SuperSandro2000

git log is no changelog...

But it is a pain for a distro to upgrade a vulnerable crate dependency

From a distro maintainer perspective every project that is only buildable with bazel is an absolute nightmare.

Thats why nix unpacks the archives first and then hashes them.

I will never understand why people prefer debian's old packages. When I was using it I constantly was looking for features in newer versions because they actually are useful and made things things possible which where not easily before. Also installing anything out of tree is just a huge mess. Also when you are on testing things would fall apart almost every week.

Also you can easily remove packages without leaving now unused libraries behind.

NixOS.

Not going back to imperative, none atomic updates aka I don't know what is configured on this machine or it just broke completely apart in the middle of the update and I need to clean up the mess right now.

Chris, have a warm f** you from me.

> still running fine is the elephant in the room here

No, it is not. Twitter had more down times in the last weeks than ever before. Regularly the timeline is not loading and since a few days the viewer count is broken.

> MacOS is still a second-class citizen in the Nix world and a fair amount of stuff doesn't work properly

and that will stay this way if Apple continues to make major and breaking changes with every update and changing MacOS more and more away from a BSD system and locking it further down.

My very personal recommendation: You don't, at least on a single user machine. Instead you use one of the many dotfile managers out there and for anything package related NixOS. home-manager makes the feedback loop for editing configs managed through it very long, which slowed me personally down a lot. One place where I would recommend home-manager is, if you are not using NixOS and only manage your packages through it.

There is the nix language and the nix program which is a package manager and cli at the same time. There might also be the running joke in German that nix literally means nothing but there is no etc. nix does not generally refer to anything else.

It is ready for prime time if you are an advanced linux user already. It is the greatest thing since sliced bread if you where using Arch or Gentoo before.

Do you have more than two machines you want to keep in sync? Do you don't want to track custom patches for software? Do you want to make upgrades painless? Do you want to be forced to at least have documentation as code? Do you need to manage a multi user environment and want to know what is configured?

With NixOS you don't need to think about re-installs. They are painless and an order of magnitude easier to do. You know you will get the same configuration back.

Kubernetes is complicated and a good choice for a big team with lots of containers, but rather pointless for a single machine. NixOS already works great for a single machine and scales well for more machines but not as well as k8s. If you are building 100 different machines on hydra, you start to run into scaling problems pretty fast.

So what are actual bad points: - you must work with the nix, not against it. If you want to continue your current workflow and don't change anything, nix will be a big obstacle for you. - you need to invest some time and start climb the steeper learning curve. - documentation could and should be better, especially general guides that enable and teach you how to solve your problems yourself - smaller and bigger rough edges in places that are usually very different to classical distros

Two years ago I didn't know a thing about nix, NixOS or functional programming. I wanted to manage multiple machines with a sort of config file. Shouldn't be that hard, right? Removal of packages should be done automatically without explicitly removing the package. So brew and ansible failed already with those, to me at the time, pretty basic requirements. Building deb meta packages was inconvenient and they broke every single time when I didn't update a machine for some weeks. Managing requires, replaces, conflicts was cumbersome and often put me into hard problems. Then I learned about nix. First it seemed rather complex. Why does it need to do everything different? Strongly believing that it won't solve my problems and it isn't worth the rather steep learning curve. I tried two weeks to find alternatives but there where none and slowly nix seemed to be the only available solution to my problem which first didn't seem to be that complicated...

Here I am now. With LOTs of struggle and sweat. Never gave up debugging the most strange errors and very often fixing them in the end. Starting as a total beginner and very slowly becoming a very big fan, advocate and contributor to NixOS. Not regretting the journey. Being happy to have remove all Debian frickel kisten from my life. :)

PS: If you run NixOS 22.05 or older: Some parts of the code for your machine is from me. How awesome is that? Couldn't have imagined that two years ago.

It is actually slower than Ubuntu which can be see with the recent git update BUT if you know you need this patch or update it enables you to achieve that with overlays pretty easy and fast and if you know what you are doing you can reduce the rebuild amounts to near zero. You also need to remember that behind NixOS there is not a big corp like canonical but mostly a community with way to much time. If you ever tried to build an Ubuntu package with a custom patch you will know how painful it is and unmaintainable. Not with nix. Easy maintenance included with automatic, atomic rebuilds and applying the patch to the next software version if the source code didn't change.

> There are workarounds but none of them official.

But does it need to be official? Wouldn't that at the same time bloat nix even more? Isn't it enough if core people of the community for example build https://github.com/nix-community/nix-user-chroot ?

> In reality the only easy way to get it done is to use additional non-foss software

That is not true at all. You can use a nix docker image, a 5 line nix file and 2 commands to do a very basic CI pipeline almost anywhere.

> It is behind a configuration flag, so it isn't obvious how to use it.

It is: the error message tells you exactly how to activate it.

> A division in community, projects and documentation happens this way.

No, not really. flakes are not fundamentally different, they just replace channels, a very small component, with something new and more powerful. You can convert any NixOS config in minutes if you just import the configuration.nix, add --impure and add a nixpkgs input.

> its surrounding CLI tools aren't mentioned in the official docs.

There is an entire section in the nix manual about them https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/experimental...

> This makes those people look for and create their own solutions:

Also not entirely true. Before flakes there where several projects like niv which are now more and more in maintenance mode and got replaced by flakes. There was a need for a feature like flakes in the community for a long time and it it slowly forming shape.

> This results in multiple documentation sites:

Yes, like for any other big ecosystem. There will grow community maintained wiki's, opinionated websites, guides and resources. Is that necessarily a bad thing? We can't prevent people from creating them and not everything fits into the official guide especially if it is opinionated.

> Multiple wrapping tools for development environments:

Same thing. nix-shell is pretty basic and does not have every bell and whistle and people in the community build on top of that, create wrappers and new tools and try to build the bells and whistles. Similar things for example happened in the debian community with for example aptitude and synaptics.

> I'm still hoping Nix flakes will become the default

It will and the tools you listed above won't go away. Flakes do not attempt to replace them and what they try to achieve but to support them.

You have similar but yet different problems on other distros, too.

For example if you want to use a very old node version then you either find a prerecompilation for your distro or also compile it yourself. The precompilation might be linked against an older glibc version or compiling does not work with your distros because your icu version is incompatible and then you are in the same rabbit hole.

volta "just works" because it was specifically designed to achieve one defined purpose run on a few platforms and is well tested on those. nix is general and cannot achieve everything. Somewhere maintainers need to cut a line otherwise things get completely out of hand.

Network is restricted in the sandbox because otherwise reproducibility would be severely reduced and we could not guarantee that the outputs match what we expect them to be. Also downloaded binaries would usually need patching anyway.

Also you are not supposed to take everything from nixpkgs. Like on any other distro if you are developing something the ecosystems own tools are the most well equipped and have all the versions. The versions in nixpkgs are the versions we need for other packages and NixOS, not every possible version you could need to develop a project with specific requirements necessarily.

PS: volta did not just work on my NixOS machine because it assumes that relative to glibc there will be a lib directory where it can place things.

> (Nix refers to the language, package manager, cli, community, etc)

Thats wrong. It refers to exactly two things: the language and the cli that implements that and is a package manager at the same time.

My first instinct was: how to get rid of the left menu and get the text wider again.

Nix needs root to install unless you do some extra work.

I saw NixOS

So either you disable the proxy completely for your site or get overwhelmed by traffic from a not to well written service, similar to a small DDOS attack, which is run by google and they are not planning to fix this? Did I get anything wrong here?

fzf

Last time I tried it, it mostly suggested the line above.

But you need to configure it and by default it breaks most shortcuts on websites.

And for me excel wastes 100 hours a month.

No, because older software versions are dropped often rather quickly, especially if they are not maintained by upstream anymore, to reduce required maintaince work on them.

Any words about false positive rates? What it can summarize well and what not?

But to secure my hardware security key I need a PIN, too otherwise anyone can just borrow it. Also I still need a backup in case I actually lose it somewhere. And when I get recommended to reinstall my browser to fix a problem and I accidentally deleted my profile I might lose access to accounts.