Thought I’d checkout NixOS… Gives the option of Pantheon desktop (which I chose)… In KVM via virt-manager of course…
Wow!
So many hoops to jump through just to get vi/vim, sshd listening and sudo without password… make a slight error in the config file (e.g. misplaced colon) and it barfs… I kinda LOATHE distros that don’t include vi/vim by default… But then I use Debian based (Debian and Ubuntu) distros - and they default things like “visudo” to nano, and Debian’s busybox doesn’t include vi/vim…
I guess it’s very secure…
Anyway ItsFoss Newsletter mentions Netherlands govt switching from Microslop to NixOs - after French govt did it… So I thought I’d have a gander…
I can understand how useful it would be enforcing configurations… And as it’s all text files - could be granularly controlled / enforced using a Config Mgmt tool like Ansible, or Puppet or Chef…
Not sure I’d opt for this as a daily driver, ever…
Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system.
Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system.
Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It’s a collection of many thousands of “derivations”, many of the things you’d expect to be able to fetch from brew or apt. Each derivation encodes the steps to use Nix (the build system) to construct that output.
NixOS is a Linux distribution built atop Nix, Nix, and Nixpkgs. The basic claim to fame here is “totally declarative system setup” where you write all of the configuration for your system in Nix, using Nixpkgs and some other NixOS specific tooling and libraries, and then “build” the entire system with high repeatability.|
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It seems that Nix is different from apt in that it keeps each installed app in its own directory, and executes it in a sandbox.
It also seems Nixos allow you to configure everything in a system from one file
Those are radical concepts. Can someone check on that? I have no experiencd here.
I generally use openSUSE but I have a 2009 Core2 Quad PC which I put together. I want to keep it going but doesn’t meet SUSE latest requirement ( x86-64-v1 or 2 depending on distro).
Out of curiosity I tried a live NixOS-26.05 KDE Plasma and to my amazement it run without a problem or too slowly and with the usual apps and Plasma/KDE windows.
I have just started playing with it and trying to understand how to use it and the advantages of having the apps/version running as self-contained packages, against the new installation procedure. So looking forward to comments here.
What GPU are you using? I have been working on a Dell Inspiron 530 that has a core2 CPU and a GT430 and I have unmasked the 390.157 driver and have Gentoo locked down to that driver and have also masked gcc and all kernel updates that portage might pull in!! The nouveau driver, is a joke, but the nvidia driver and Gentoo has the old pc running well!!
The PC has a nVidia G9C GeForce 9400GT card and you may be right that the problem was the driver rather that x86_64-v2 . I had locked the driver but I forgot during later updates and maybe that was the problem. After several unsuccessful attempts at reinstalling Leap16.0 and Slowroll I tried Xubuntu and that installed without a hitch. So Ok now.
But I am now testing live NixOS with the idea of installing it instead. It seems quite an interesting distro, but also a steep change for my knowledge of Linux
I can imagine NixOS being an administrators wet dream, with all the control it hands over.
Then again, I can also imagine administrators not liking it by the amount of (perceived) work required to get a working system up and running and maintaining it.
On the website there’s no explanation on how to update the system (security fixes, for example) or to update NixOS to the latest stable version. Is that easy?
