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A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
This is a well-written post. I agree that “friction” involved with small changes and incompatibility with some Linux binaries are significant downsides. I think NixOS makes a lot of sense for development environments, but it’s not my preference for a personal device
I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.
I'm always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.
Is your hardware always the exact same? Because if it isn't, then I'm sure you have to do modifications to your config file. And at that point you night as well just use a regular distro instead.
So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I've got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.
There's really only two files you ever have to touch that I've used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you'll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it's supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I'm talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It's all seamless damn near.
You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I've what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.
A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn't build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you've made over time.
So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I've made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It's supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.
You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.
I've tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I'm happy. I think there's just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.
You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host" and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).
Loved nixOS but couldn't install PIA VPN gui and disliked the workarounds. Also doing .net dev was more awkward than I liked so went back to Arch and wrote some scripts to install all the packages I want instead. Love the idea of nixOS though.
I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.
Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.
I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use. For example, I love KDE, but they really don't do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.
I think you over complicating your view here. I daily nix. Your not carrying a bunch if dot files. You have one. A single nix. Config. That's it. It's not big, long, messy, what so ever. I have mine commented by section from boot order to auto updates and backups. Your talking about 150 lines of extremely short and almost self explanatory code. I came from mint having never used nix. I figured it out doing a custom luks install and the whole custom build from scratch in no time.
Your diff issue is overblown. The edits you make are small and you cannot get lost in multiple configs unless your doing entire system writes which you would never do. I use a dead light weight diff GUI or terminal. This has to be one if the cleanest, maintenance free distros I have ever used.
It doesn't seem you have truly driven Nix with this take. No program writes directly to your config, even if there was say your temp scenario you reboot and temps would wipe away like you never did them unless you rebuild nix config. Most of your concerns would fall away once you really drove nix to see how it functions.
Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say "dotfiles", I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don't have to deal with the dotfiles myself.
I've used nixos exclusively lately. It's been awesome. No system scatter, clutter. It'd immutable. There's very slight driver hassle (you don't have GUI for drivers so a simple terminal command fetches everything you need.) in cinnamon. I came from mint. I have all basic commands in executable files on desktop for ease of hassle. It's not about rebuilding the system. Its about being hands off. Next to zero maintenance because not much in your system gets altered. I went for a full custom install from terminal. The only thing I personally miss being GUI is a firewall like UFW or GUFW.
Overall its more rock solid and workable than likely every distro I have ever tried. The feature set is nice, easy rollbacks, fucking cake backups. All you have to know is your entire system lives on one small editable file called nix. Configuration. Keep it in a micro SD or USB or any backup and it's as if you never left. Any changes you want you simply tweak in the config then reboot. If it breaks then select your previous gen number on boot and your exactly where you was before.
I diff my edits and keep copies, run auto backups, and more. It's so hands off that I haven't found a better replacement yet. My single biggest concern is long-term viability in the project.
This is a good example of what people consistently overlook/misunderstand, when it comes to Nix.
Obviously you can remount a /home, or just pull the dotfiles from a personal repo, but the strength of Nix is also in that I can re-create my entire config exactly how it is defined. If i were to setup a machine completely from scratch, with a mature enough config, it will get me from 0 to my exact desktop completely unattended.
But there are also many more advantages to it, at least in my eyes. Let's take trying/tweaking new packages as an example. Yesterday I pulled an old repo for an Outer Wilds mod. The thing needs a dev environment, and a mod manager for the actual game. A nix shell got me both, I finished my work, and when I exit out of fish, both are gone, just as I wanted them to be.
Another good example would be partial os updates. I've used Arch for almost 9 years before switching to Nix, and pretty much a top3 Arch rule is not doing partial updates, or partial rollbacks. In case of a breakage, I would have to manually redownload an older version of a tarball, pacman -U the package, and then hope i'm not cooked. In the case of gcc incompatibilities, it can quickly become a massive pain in the ass. My nix flake would never experience this problem, because I already have two different scenarios available - either i build based on an older lockfile from my git repo, or I create an overlay for a specific input I need, so that it still pulls what it needs, and doesn't interfere with the rest of my system
You only have one machine? I benefit from sharing configs between the laptop and the desktop. They are not the same, but I can easily copy paste a complex service I defined in my desktop to do the same thing on my laptop
I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.
Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I'll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.
But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn't happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it's just not for non-technical Linux users.
Untrue. I came from windows, to Linux mint, then now I daily nix. I'm an average person who prefers to be terminal hands off. I did a full custom install from my mint setup to nix, apps, luks, the entire swap and booted as if I never left basically. I faltered a few times and had to select previous generations in my boot menu but honestly it'd because somehow I fucked up my UUIDs. The learning curve is there but let me assure you it's minimal in terms of linux, and it's dead stable because nothing changes without you doing it. In 1000 years it should still be running Unadultered.
Meanwhile me as a barbarian installing Debian and copying my ~/.bashrc file (and a few others) if not just remounting /home/ in the new installation every few years.
The biggest downside to containers vs. Nix for me is that Nix can produce binaries for Linux and macOS, whereas docker only helps with Linux unless you can perform literal magic to cross-compile your project on Linux for macOS.
Containers also don't give you reproducible environments, and Nix does.
That said, Nix documentation is ass, so I usually end up going with containers because they require far less suffering to get working because writing a containerfile is much easier than guessing how to hobble together a Nix flake with a mostly undocumented language.
Skipped to the "ugly" part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?
I think a bigger problem is that it's hard to find "best practices" because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.
Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it's a struggle when it comes to doing things like "how do I change the source of a package", "how do I compose two modules together" and "how do I add a repo to a flake so it's visible in my config". Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they're taking about.
I always aim at packages and issued inside my nix config cuts all this hassle out atleast for me.. Ive got everything pretty meticulously commented and in order of boot process and in general running step by step order. I'm pretty sure I dumb monkey could figure out how it runs. I came from windows then mint then nix. To give you an idea of my PC knowledge. I think the whole point if nix is to keep the system contained and not scattered. I see many posters mentioning system scatter on nix as an issue and I have no idea how theu managed to complicate one if the simplest systems I've ever used as far as clean, tidy, goes.
I've been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn't break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn't force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it's just... kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.
Guess what happened... I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks...
I really really really like the declarative stuff. Installing packages through config files is so nice I'll never lose track of what I've installed ever again 🥰 🥰 🥰 I was already using a git repo for all my config files + GNU Stow to symlink everything to its proper place, so adding the .nix configs to that setup was very easy.
Having a clean system on rebuild is great. No more clutter left everywhere that I don't know about, no more half broken stuff left lying around.
But... - It's not Arch. Not Nix's fault, but I kept hearing that it would be "like Arch but declarative"... and it's really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible. - I absolutely hate the language. - What's with those error messages from hell??? - And speaking of hell, every language that can't just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea) - Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it's unfair since it's not trying to be a rolling release... but... but...) - Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant... 😭 - Nix packages are weird. Even someone who's terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS... I miss you Arch 😢 - Apps not working because of paths that don't exist on Nix... what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there's steam-run, great preserver of what's left of my sanity. - ~~Can't wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don't bother just do it imperatively...)~~ (Edit: Finally figured it out!!!) - Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don't already know what you are doing (and I clearly don't 😅) - Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven't installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it's already configured is not in the default config files. It's very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it's configured by default.
But it's kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.
Yes it's a headache if you don't have a clue what you're doing and suck at coding like me, but the good parts might make the headache worth it depending on what you want of your distro. A week ago I couldn't wait to get a new laptop to reinstall Arch, but now I'm actually wondering if I should keep trying Nix... OH GOD HAVE I CAUGHT THE NIX BRAIN CANCER? 😭
I'm just seeing your comment after I recommended Guix, that I could read and understand Guile Scheme is what made me hop away from NixOS, the nixlang is an ungrokable mess
I'm not a fan of nested parenthesis... but aside from that I don't know much about the language, is it more convenient? Does it also suffer from the error messages from hell problem?
Guix is a distribution of the GNU operating system.
Guix is technology that respects the freedom of computer users.
You are free to run the system for any purpose, study how it
works, improve it, and share it with the whole world.
That is something you can't quite escape in Nix either. While it doesn't use parenthesis like a Lisp, the nature of the language and the depths of the sets you are dealing with still makes you end up getting a lot of this at the end of your files:
];
};
};
};
}
Having one } too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.
While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don't get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that's actually build for the task.
But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it’s unfair since it’s not trying to be a rolling release… but… but…)
Sure, some packages are outdated. But in terms of percentage of up-to-date packages, it's (AFAIK) the best out of any distro repo. And that's perhaps even more impressive of a feat when realizing it also sports the biggest repo. For actual stats: repology.org/repositories/stat…
Wait how does Nix Unstable have a better score than the AUR? With four times less maintainers? That's really impressive, especially considering how much more simple Arch packages are to make.
Nix has more up to date packages than most distros have packages in total. There's a bot that goes around updating them automatically if they are from github. Maybe there's an issue with your package?
It's reproducible, so random updates are a no-no. You can however just dump the Git URL in your flake.nix inputs and then override the src of the package with that. The source gets updated when you do nix flake update next time. Something like this:
Finally managed to enable VSCode extensions without doing it imperatively or using home manager I'm so happy I could cry 😭 😭 😭
It actually wasn't even that bad, I'm just terrible at understanding documentation I guess
(vscode-with-extensions.override {
vscodeExtensions = with vscode-extensions; [
bodil.blueprint-gtk # Gtk Bluprint language support
ms-vscode.makefile-tools # Makefile language support
bbenoist.nix # Nix language support
ms-python.python # Python language support
naumovs.color-highlight # Color Highlight
ms-azuretools.vscode-docker # Docker
donjayamanne.githistory # Git History
seatonjiang.gitmoji-vscode # Gitmoji
];
})
You absolutely do. If you build a container and publish it you will pull down that exact thing every time. How is that not "reproducibility"?
You no what though? Scratch that - who gives a fuck? Bit-for-bit reproducibility takes far more effort than it's worth anyway. Even NixOS isn't completely reproducible. It's a false goal.
For dev environments, repeatable is okay.
It's well more than good enough you mean.
If you want actually reproducible binaries that you can ship, Nix is better fit for that purpose.
with ansible, you are responsible for making sure that executing the described steps in the described order leads to the desired result
with nix, you describe what you want your system to look like, and then figuring out how to get there is nix's problem (or rather, is obvious to nix thanks to nixpkgs)
It's missing the fact that the nix store can be huge, even if garbage collected regularly. This prevents me from using nix on my Ubuntu laptop with limited HDD space.
I haven't had any issues thus far. But I have not used a lot of appimages. Usually I can find everything in nixpkgs, and those that I didn't all worked with appimages.
I'm not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn't it turn "it works on my machine" into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: ... "?
Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just : (e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.
The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a services.foobar.enable = true and sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing that search.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.
There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.
There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who's familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that's even close to mainstream).
Dynamic typing (you mention this briefly). Some people like the extra flexibility that dynamic typing gives, but there's a tradeoff: more errors. The thing is, due to NixOS's complicated structure, the traceback for an evaluation error might not give you any information about where the cause is (indeed, the traceback might not include a single line of your own code!). This makes errors unusually costly in NixOS specifically, so any language feature that causes more runtime errors automatically has a worse impact than it would in a more "normal" language.
The "standard library" (builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at least nixpkgs-lib if you want to get any real work done.
No real data abstraction mechanisms. No ADTs, no nominal types. The only composite types are attrsets and lists. The usual way to encode a custom type is as an attrset with a _type field or some such.
While we're at it, very limited pattern-matching.
Clunky list literal syntax: no commas between list elements. I can't tell you the number of times I've forgotten to surround list elements in parentheses.
Can anyone remember the rules for escaping ${ or ''? I have to look them up every time.
I'm not quite sure why you think pointing out someone's confidently incorrect claim that containers do give you reproducible environments means that I fetishsize anything?
But if you genuinely want to know why reproducibility is valuable, take a look at reproducible-builds.org/.
I was quite happy to see that Debian and Arch have both made great strides into making tooling that enables reproducible packages in recent times. It's probable that, because of efforts like this, creating reproducible builds will become easier/possible on most Linux environments, including traditional container workflows.
For now though, Nix Flakes are much better at enabling reproducible builds of your software than traditional containers, if you can suffer through Nix not being documented very well. This article covers some more details on different build systems and compares them with Nix Flakes if you want more concrete examples.
FWIW, I think that containers are awesome, and using them for dev environments and CI tooling solves a lot of very real problems ("it works on my machine", cheap and easy cross-compilation for Linux systems, basic sandboxing, etc.) for people. I use containers for a lot of those reasons. But if I need to make something reproducible, there are better tools for the job.
I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!
But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it's easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn't mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I'm going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don't want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here's how you configure it. Here's how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn't figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.
I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can't recommend this to my tech friends because if I'm confused they will be more so.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Turkey’s news agency Anadolu has exposed the extensive devastation caused by Israel’s airstrike on Iran’s Evin Prison, highlighting a deliberate massacre of detainees, civilians, and staff.
@jeremiah there is no need to remake any of the original trilogy. They’ll just ruin it with CGI, or completely rewrite the story, like they did with Jumanji.
@CattleBaronI don't know anything about the pressures and stuff yet. I have 2 vehicle AC units I need to replace and haven't pulled the first part. Check Eric The Car Guy or South Main Auto on YouTube, or even look for a manufacturer's video.
This post got a lot more interest than expected! Currently working on revising this post to incorporate the excellent suggestions from Hacker News. Having said that, please still provide feedback.
A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA…
A delegation of anti-Zionist Rabbis expressed solidarity at the #Iranian Mission to the #UnitedNations in #NYC , offering condolences to the Iranian nation f...
What do you mean by that? The Neturei Karta rejects the idea of a Jewish state altogether, so they're most probably strongly opposed to what's happening in Gaza.
I find a little disturbing what they say about the Iranian government. I don't believe they're any better than any other government.
Thanks a lot @Sunyata ☸ 👨🏻💻 ☮! This is very important, because people like me could, knowing that N.Y. has a huge Jewish community, think that they tolerate this abomination... I would have been very sad because I red and valued Jewish culture a lot....
On Monday, 30 June 2025, Palestinian prisoners’ institutions reported the martyrdom of Louay Faisal Mohammed Nasrallah (Turkman), 22, imprisoned by the occupation, in Soroka Hospital. He had …
Generally true, but the ones out at our city park have totally rusted out underneath. Nobody's been pissing on them, they're just exposed to the weather.
If I remember later today, I might take a photo of the pair of water fountains at our park. The top stainless steel side looks perfectly fine, but the metal panel underneath both of them is totally rusted out. I'm pretty sure they disabled/disconnected both of them.
Not sure where I might post the photo though, guess I might post under Nowhere Else To Post.. 🤷
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses our full solidarity with Palestine Action, threatened with proscription by the British imperialist regime because of their direct action t…
Hi fellow #HEMA enthusiasts, Friend of mine is crowdfunding the English translation of his book, "Unboxing Fabris", which is actually two books. My friend is a HEMA instructor, and together with master Óscar Torres, he has studied, analysed, break down and rebuild the techniques of Italian master Salvator Fabris. They have condensed all this work in the first book, and written a full training method in the second. The whole thing is illustrated with a ton of photos.
I have the Spanish version and I can only recommend it.
In a blatant escalation of political repression, the Dutch state has rejected the appeal of Mohammed Khatib, Europe coordinator of Samidoun, upholding his two-year entry ban into the Netherlands. …
RenFecht 2025! a couple of my HEMA friends and I are organizing a longsword tournament to be held at the largest renfaire in America, the Texas Renaissance Festival. I commissioned Vel1m0r@twitter.com to draw a lovely piece to help promote the event and I think it turned out amazing.
HEMA is still very niche. bringing up politics does the community no good because the polarization decreases exposure to an already small number of active fighters. by all means go resolve differences in another setting, but what is the point of bringing it to a tournament? Not participating in a match against someone because of their affiliation, their religion or identity being known? to me that is a lost opportunity to fight someone new that can greatly inform one's own training.
United Nations climate expert is calling for people who question the goal of avoiding a climate catastrophe by rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to face criminal penalties. The experts who would be targeted for these penalties say these calls for censorship are part of a broader, growing effort to stop people from speaking out against climate activists’ political agenda.
A U.N. report calls for climate skepticism to be criminalized, and other reports are pressuring social media companies to remove content questioning the "climate crisis" narrative.
On Tuesday Senator Chuck Grassley released new information from declassified documents that reveal the FBI blocked an investigation into the allegations that the Chinese Communist Party manufactured thousands of fake driver’s licenses and shipped them to the US in a scheme to help Joe Biden win the election by fraudulent mail-in votes.
On Tuesday Senator Chuck Grassley released new information from declassified documents that reveal the FBI blocked an investigation into the allegations that the Chinese Communist Party manufactured thousands of fake driver’s licenses and s…
With Jurassic World: Rebirth coming out soon, I figured it was time to head back into the park by watching Chaos Theory! And I gotta say, guys. This is a much, much harder watch than I thought. I miss when Jurassic Park PTSD was funny talking velociraptors and not hallucinating your dead loved one.
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“Jurassic World: Chaos Theory” Season 1, Episode 1, “Aftermath”
Rest Stop is the second episode of the first season in the Netflix series, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. The episode was released on May 24, 2024. A frightening chase fuels Ben's theory that the Nublar Six are being hunted...
Lmao the what-the-fuckening continues. Why are so many characters getting eaten!!! They had, like, one major death per season in Camp Cretaceous, and now it's like, here, your emotional support e-girl is dead, and so's her criminal not-quite-father-in-law too! And Yaz! My dear, sweet Yaz is trapped on PTSD Island and I am just so, so sad...
Halfway Home is the fifth episode of the first season in the Netflix series, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. The episode was released on May 24, 2024. Ben and Sammy make a pit stop for snacks at King Dino's Prehistoric Playland.
Lety Does Reacting to “Jurassic World: Chaos Theory” Season 1, Episodes 7 & 8
What the fuck is going on, ahhh!!! I just want Darius and Kenji to be friends again! They're literally brothers, and now their lives are torn apart for this weird-ass love triangle that I was kinda happy they didn't go with during Camp Cretaceous, but holy heck, why is there so much unresolved sexual tension with a dead wife character in this children's cartoon and IS BROOKLYNN A BAD GUY??? WAS DANIEL KON RIGHT ABOUT HER? WHAT IS HAPPENING!!!
The Camp Cretaceous gang comes together to unravel a mystery when they discover a global conspiracy that brings danger to dinosaurs — and to themselves.
What the fuck is going on, ahhh!!! I just want Darius and Kenji to be friends again! They're literally brothers, and now their lives are torn apart for this weird-ass love triangle that I was kinda happy they didn't go with during Camp Cretaceous, but holy heck, why is there so much unresolved sexual tension with a dead wife character in this children's cartoon and IS BROOKLYNN A BAD GUY??? WAS DANIEL KON RIGHT ABOUT HER? WHAT IS HAPPENING!!!
The Camp Cretaceous gang comes together to unravel a mystery when they discover a global conspiracy that brings danger to dinosaurs — and to themselves.
@June Moon If you're going to get bombed just before supposed negotiations anyway, why would you cooperate? If I had Israel for a neighbor, I'd want La Bomba class bombs.
Are you FUCKING kidding me??? I spent the whole fucking season grieving with Darius and Kenji over Brooklynn's death, only to turn out she might have fucking deserved it cause she was working with Daniel Kon. Only to find out she's not just working with Daniel Kon, she's the FUCKING BROKER???
A Pachyrhinosaurus! Which I only really remember the name of cause I like Pachycephalosauruses!
Big Eatie the T-Rex, right? Darius said it wasn't, but it was 100% Big Eatie. It's not like there were many other T-Rexes on Nublar
A pregnant Bumpy the Ankylosaurus, which.... I can't remember how reproduction works in Jurassic World, but something about this feels off cause I don't remember other Ankylosauruses on Mantah Corp Island
“Jurassic World: Chaos Theory” Season 1, Episode 10: “The End of the Beginning”
The Camp Cretaceous gang comes together to unravel a mystery when they discover a global conspiracy that brings danger to dinosaurs — and to themselves.
Took some time to cool off after the season 1 finale of Chaos Theory and decided to jump back into it until Peacemaker's back on TV. Anyways. Where the fuck. Is Brooklynn. Why the fuck is she a terrorist now. Why isn't Ben telling anyone their dead best friend is alive and part of dinosaur ISIS. What the fuck is happening.
The Marooned Five is the second episode of the second season in the Netflix series Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. The episode was released on October 17, 2024. On dry land, the gang meets a family of farmers with unusual livestock.
Yeah, watching the first season and the first episode of this season, the show really knows how to build suspense. But because of the show being meant for kids (Y7), there's no gore.
I saw Jurassic World: Rebirth and watching this for lore in preparation for that movie is fruitless.
You should watch Camp Cretaceous! Chaos Theory is a sequel to that, which is basically “What if six kids got left behind on Isla Nublar when Jurassic World got evacuated?” and it's really great
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So they’re copying Dave and Busters by trying to become what they should have stayed to begin with.
Not gonna work. Dave and Busters is terrible.
But get some cool animatronic shows, .25 cent arcade games from the 80s- 90s, maybe even a few amusement center rides like the old Scandia centers had (go karts, suspended rides, bumper boats, mini golf). THAT would be worthwhile.
It'll work. Millennial nostalgia is a cash cow. There are multiple arcade bars in my area that seem to do pretty well.
...actually, rereading the article, I don't see that they'll serve alcohol. Or food at all, for that matter. And it looks like they're building them out of empty mall tenancies.
I go to a local arcade bar all the time (hubs loves Stepmaniax), I see tons of parents taking their kids there. There's usually people in the bar area if you don't go at like, 11 am. It honestly seems like a great business plan, new and classic arcade games, catered to both children and their parents simultaneously?
Hungary: Antifa Prisoner Maja Hospitalized Following Hunger Strike
For almost a month, the non-binary antifa activist Maja has been on hunger strike to denounce the conditions of their imprisonment in Hungary and to ask to be sent back to Germany. On Tuesday, July 1, their health deteriorated so much that hospitalization was necessary. Maja was moved 260 km from Budapest to a hospital near the Romanian border.
Solidarity actions continue (banks have been stoned in Shwelm and Leipzig – see here and here), but in the face of this alarming situation, their supporters are calling for an intensification of mobilization.
Depuis près d’un mois, la militante antifa non-binaire Maja a entamé une grève de la faim pour dénoncer les conditions de son emprisonnement en Hongrie et demander à être renvoyée en Allemagne (voir notre article).
Back in 2003, I was qualified for a lousy $28 a month in Food Stamps, as long as I came in twice a week for their work program.
It cost more for the gasoline to make it to their work program than the benefits offered. It's cheaper to sit on my ass than to qualify for SNAP. And that was way before the orange man.
@cm0002 You know there is the "safety net" and then there is the "I don't want to work net", and way too many people are on the latter and the country is suffering for it.
#PDiddy (#SeanCombs) being acquitted of sex #trafficking but found guilty of lesser charges is yet another sign that the #system is working as intended, unjust and built to protect the #wealthy.
A growing number of pro-Palestine #activists in the #UK have reported #police harassment since the launch of Israel’s war on #Gaza, with homes raided & #activists trailed by authorities in a ‘pattern of intimidation.’
At 7am on 6 March, three men turned up at Lujane's door.
They said they were from the British Transport Police (BTP) and asked her to come for an interview regarding a video in which, several months before, she had been seen chanting pro-Palestine …
Israel has insisted it won't give up its aim of defeating Hamas in Gaza, while Hamas said it would only free the remaining hostages after the war ends.
There's no end to complaints about how the New York Times covers news, but here's another. This passive-voice headline about the death of the USGCRP climate research website, globalchange.gov, makes it sound like, oops, the site just "stopped working" rather than the MAGAs intentionally targeted & deleted it.
The Logitech Options+ offline installer enables users as well as ITDMs to install the software to computers that do not have access to the internet (or are on an air-gapped network). It shares all ...
Everyone in the US who voted for Donald, everyone in the US who stayed home, everyone who said "they're both the same", everyone who spent months being useful idiots for the fascist party's enthusiasm suppression agitprop by amplifying attacks and attacking Biden and then Harris -- you own this. You are responsible.
There was no higher priority in 2024 than preventing the election of a man who never wanted to govern and only wanted to rule. I fucking warned you, and so many of you blew me off.
Google translate: Urgent | Several Palestinians, mostly children, have been killed after an Israeli airstrike targeted a crowd on Al-Baraka Street, south of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
Google translate: Farewell, Dr. Marwan Al-Sultan With all appreciation and gratitude, we bid farewell today to the dear Dr. Marwan Al-Sultan, who tirelessly dedicated himself for 21 months with effort and sincerity.
You were a model of commitment and humanity, and your legacy will remain present in everyone who knew you and worked with you.
The Trump administration has officially shuttered the United States Agency for International Development after rolling its operations into the State Department.Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the end of the independent agency on Tuesday.
Google translate: "114 Palestinians were killed in Gaza today, July 2, 2025, as Israeli forces bombed several areas. The death toll now reaches around 700 weekly and 2,800 monthly, with thousands wounded or missing, as families search under rubble amid a worsening siege and dire humanitarian crisis."
Google translate: "My first meeting with my dear brother and journalist friend Mohammed Emad Al-Sultan after his release from the occupation's prisons, where he spent more than 400 days. Today, he ascended as a martyr, leaving behind an unforgettable pain."
Google translate: "As a citizen of Gaza, I support a ceasefire by any means now. We are not living.. we are just trying to survive. What we can describe is not worth a fraction of the pain, oppression, displacement, threats, hunger, and countless crises we are enduring. We are in the hardest stages of our lives. Save what remains of us. Our Lord is with us and will not abandon us."
The family of the Colorado terror suspect who injured 8 Israeli hostage supporters with homemade firebombs last month can be deported, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.
US District Court Judge Orlando Garcia dismissed Mohamed Sabry Soliman family’s legal challenge to their deportation — stating that the Trump administration has conducted normal and legal removal proceedings.
Google translate: "While you are sleeping now… The Israeli occupation bombed a school sheltering displaced people in the Al-Rimal neighborhood west of Gaza. Families fled from death, only to find it in their last refuge."
@jazzilla If you are not a sovereign citizen in the USA then you are just a subject of the government. Like all the fags and retards in England and Canada...Why do people have a problem with this? Sovereignty, that is.
@jazzilla something from Websters... to have sovereign power is to have absolute power—that is, power that cannot be checked by anyone or anything. Nations and states are also sometimes described as "sovereign." This means that they have power over themselves; their government is under their own control, rather than under the control of an outside authority.
Sovereign can also be a synonym of supreme as in "of the most exalted kind." In that case, the power is figurative rather than literal.
This is very experimental still so be ware and be ready for crashing/locking. Very interesting idea so we thought it is worth of conscious experimentation. DO NOT EXIT the WM as usual without killing wayback first, you may lose all input devices so no way to switch to other tty. Either use a 2nd machine and sshd service, or have some script kill wayback after a period of inactivity, like a screensaver with a command.
Wayback is a project from Alpine in an effort to quit supporting Xorg-server before it is even abandoned, and run any wm or DE within a wayland composer. As I understand it using xwayland they can provide a simulated xserver enviornment as an xwayland application for a wm or de to start in. What appears to be lacking at the moment is what happens when the wm exits. kb and pointer input is lost and you hang in a machine that functions perfectly if it can be reached from outside. If you start conky together with jwm and exit jwm, conky keeps running on this fake xorg environment but the wm is gone, and with it kb and mouse.
So if you can replace the menu item for exit to killall wayback things will work well 😀
Still, the deficiencies of wayland are carried on but this is really early phase of development, not beta, this is gamma stage. Too good of an idea to keep hidden.
I get my loved vtwm running in way…lr… and this is a good thing 😀
SLight miscommunication between us, the version suffering from the above was dropped not uploaded, the latest master commit (a few commits later) no longer has this problem. Although changing tty while in the wayback session is a question to upstream. All terminals and wm tried worked, as long as seatd is running.
The display definition is virtual, not real and definition doesn't really match the chosen resolutions. It is nearly half the definition from what shows on list. The single display is branded xwayland0 and I don't believe multi-display works yet.
This has a long way to go before it can provide a real solution. Display definition and setting seem awful, and it just takes the entire display stack on itself to manipulate and provide a single virtual display as an xwayland simulation. No xinerama no tty control it is wayback or nothing till it exits. While simulating it seems to take the max resolution and defines it as the maximum possible resolution for X, which can be multiples of what it really is. So you get 5Kx4K option on a display that can only do 1/4 of this but 1/4th the size. So if your screen only does 1920 when you take it to 1920 you get something like 800x600 kind of resolution.
It is also heavy on ram use, much heavier than X itself, so our WMs become like a fraction of what wayback uses to simulate Xserver
redshift gammashift fail to make any adjustments, but don't show as failing, they just have no effect.
Google translate: Dozens of martyrs and injured were transferred to Nasser Hospital following the occupation forces' targeting of citizens who were waiting for aid in Khan Younis city, south of the Gaza Strip.
I'm going on a 4-day vacation to the north sea tomorrow and I think I'm taking the @postmarketOS phone.
The 25.06 release is the one where finally everything clicks into place for me. It's super stable. I can even take pictures! Not the prettiest, but good enough to capture memories.
![Screen shot of BlueSky post:
El Norte Recuerda
@elnorterecuerda.bsky.s...
The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us.
[quoted post inset begins]
Laura Loomer
@LauraLoomer
Alligator lives matter.
The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/7866668 "Screen shot of BlueSky post:
El Norte Recuerda
@elnorterecuerda.bsky.s...
The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us.
[quoted post inset begins]
Laura Loomer
@LauraLoomer
Alligator lives matter.
The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.")
Irdial
in reply to ikidd • • •traches
in reply to ikidd • • •Flipper
in reply to traches • • •atzanteol
in reply to Flipper • • •Phoenix3875
in reply to traches • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Phoenix3875 • • •Cyberwolf
in reply to OhVenus_Baby • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Cyberwolf • • •So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I've got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.
There's really only two files you ever have to touch that I've used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you'll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it's supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I'm talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It's all seamless damn near.
You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I've what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.
A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn't build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you've made over time.
So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I've made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It's supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.
You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.
I've tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I'm happy. I think there's just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.
iopq
in reply to Cyberwolf • • •msherburn33
in reply to Cyberwolf • • •nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host"and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).feddup
in reply to traches • • •iopq
in reply to feddup • • •feddup
in reply to iopq • • •Ephera
in reply to traches • • •I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.
Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.
I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don't do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.
OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Ephera • • •I think you over complicating your view here. I daily nix. Your not carrying a bunch if dot files. You have one. A single nix. Config. That's it. It's not big, long, messy, what so ever. I have mine commented by section from boot order to auto updates and backups. Your talking about 150 lines of extremely short and almost self explanatory code. I came from mint having never used nix. I figured it out doing a custom luks install and the whole custom build from scratch in no time.
Your diff issue is overblown. The edits you make are small and you cannot get lost in multiple configs unless your doing entire system writes which you would never do. I use a dead light weight diff GUI or terminal. This has to be one if the cleanest, maintenance free distros I have ever used.
It doesn't seem you have truly driven Nix with this take. No program writes directly to your config, even if there was say your temp scenario you reboot and temps would wipe away like you never did them unless you rebuild nix config. Most of your concerns would fall away once you really drove nix to see how it functions.
∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, null/void, des/pair, none/use name]
in reply to OhVenus_Baby • • •Ephera
in reply to OhVenus_Baby • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Ephera • • •OhVenus_Baby
in reply to traches • • •I've used nixos exclusively lately. It's been awesome. No system scatter, clutter. It'd immutable. There's very slight driver hassle (you don't have GUI for drivers so a simple terminal command fetches everything you need.) in cinnamon. I came from mint. I have all basic commands in executable files on desktop for ease of hassle. It's not about rebuilding the system. Its about being hands off. Next to zero maintenance because not much in your system gets altered. I went for a full custom install from terminal. The only thing I personally miss being GUI is a firewall like UFW or GUFW.
Overall its more rock solid and workable than likely every distro I have ever tried. The feature set is nice, easy rollbacks, fucking cake backups. All you have to know is your entire system lives on one small editable file called nix. Configuration. Keep it in a micro SD or USB or any backup and it's as if you never left. Any changes you want you simply tweak in the config then reboot. If it breaks then select your previous gen number on boot and your exactly where you was before.
I diff my edits and keep copies, run auto backups, and more. It's so hands off that I haven't found a better replacement yet. My single biggest concern is long-term viability in the project.
dinckel
in reply to traches • • •This is a good example of what people consistently overlook/misunderstand, when it comes to Nix.
Obviously you can remount a /home, or just pull the dotfiles from a personal repo, but the strength of Nix is also in that I can re-create my entire config exactly how it is defined. If i were to setup a machine completely from scratch, with a mature enough config, it will get me from 0 to my exact desktop completely unattended.
But there are also many more advantages to it, at least in my eyes. Let's take trying/tweaking new packages as an example. Yesterday I pulled an old repo for an Outer Wilds mod. The thing needs a dev environment, and a mod manager for the actual game. A
nix shellgot me both, I finished my work, and when I exit out of fish, both are gone, just as I wanted them to be.Another good example would be partial os updates. I've used Arch for almost 9 years before switching to Nix, and pretty much a top3 Arch rule is not doing partial updates, or partial rollbacks. In case of a breakage, I would have to manually redownload an older version of a tarball,
pacman -Uthe package, and then hope i'm not cooked. In the case of gcc incompatibilities, it can quickly become a massive pain in the ass. My nix flake would never experience this problem, because I already have two different scenarios available - either i build based on an older lockfile from my git repo, or I create an overlay for a specific input I need, so that it still pulls what it needs, and doesn't interfere with the rest of my systemiopq
in reply to traches • • •traches
in reply to iopq • • •iopq
in reply to traches • • •traches
in reply to iopq • • •Ephera
in reply to ikidd • • •Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I'll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.
But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn't happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it's just not for non-technical Linux users.
OhVenus_Baby
in reply to Ephera • • •utopiah
Unknown parent • • •utopiah
in reply to ikidd • • •~/.bashrcfile (and a few others) if not just remounting/home/in the new installation every few years.like this
gonzo-rand19 likes this.
9488fcea02a9
in reply to utopiah • • •One of my machines i've been just upgrading in place since debian 8. No need for new installation
Debian isn't barbaric at all.
like this
gonzo-rand19 likes this.
trevor (he/they)
in reply to utopiah • • •The biggest downside to containers vs. Nix for me is that Nix can produce binaries for Linux and macOS, whereas docker only helps with Linux unless you can perform literal magic to cross-compile your project on Linux for macOS.
Containers also don't give you reproducible environments, and Nix does.
That said, Nix documentation is ass, so I usually end up going with containers because they require far less suffering to get working because writing a containerfile is much easier than guessing how to hobble together a Nix flake with a mostly undocumented language.
SavvyWolf
in reply to ikidd • • •Skipped to the "ugly" part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?
I think a bigger problem is that it's hard to find "best practices" because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.
Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it's a struggle when it comes to doing things like "how do I change the source of a package", "how do I compose two modules together" and "how do I add a repo to a flake so it's visible in my config". Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they're taking about.
OhVenus_Baby
in reply to SavvyWolf • • •atzanteol
Unknown parent • • •atzanteol
in reply to trevor (he/they) • • •Of course it does. 🙄
trevor (he/they)
in reply to atzanteol • • •atzanteol
in reply to trevor (he/they) • • •But for like 99% of development teams "repeatable" is Good Enough(tm).
trevor (he/they)
in reply to atzanteol • • •So, containers do not get you reproducibility.
For dev environments, repeatable is okay. If you want actually reproducible binaries that you can ship, Nix is better fit for that purpose.
elucubra
in reply to ikidd • • •frozencow
in reply to elucubra • • •It is part of snowflakeos.org/, though I don't know about its developments atm.
GitHub - snowfallorg/nixos-conf-editor: A libadwaita/gtk4 app for editing NixOS configurations
GitHubiopq
in reply to frozencow • • •elucubra
in reply to ikidd • • •phantomwise
in reply to ikidd • • •I've been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn't break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn't force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it's just... kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.
Guess what happened... I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks...
But...
- It's not Arch. Not Nix's fault, but I kept hearing that it would be "like Arch but declarative"... and it's really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible.
- I absolutely hate the language.
- What's with those error messages from hell???
- And speaking of hell, every language that can't just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
- Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it's unfair since it's not trying to be a rolling release... but... but...)
- Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant... 😭
- Nix packages are weird. Even someone who's terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS... I miss you Arch 😢
- Apps not working because of paths that don't exist on Nix... what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there's steam-run, great preserver of what's left of my sanity.
- ~~Can't wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don't bother just do it imperatively...)~~ (Edit: Finally figured it out!!!)
- Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don't already know what you are doing (and I clearly don't 😅)
- Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven't installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it's already configured is not in the default config files. It's very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it's configured by default.
But it's kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.
nullpotential
in reply to phantomwise • • •phantomwise
in reply to nullpotential • • •nullpotential
in reply to phantomwise • • •phantomwise
in reply to phantomwise • • •Bluefruit
in reply to phantomwise • • •phantomwise
in reply to Bluefruit • • •eecobb
in reply to phantomwise • • •a Kendrick fan
in reply to eecobb • • •phantomwise
in reply to eecobb • • •Succinctly : "OH GOD MY EEEEEYES"
I'm not a fan of nested parenthesis... but aside from that I don't know much about the language, is it more convenient? Does it also suffer from the error messages from hell problem?
a Kendrick fan
in reply to phantomwise • • •Check out Guix_System_Distribution, it's just like NixOS but uses a Scheme dialect which is a better language.
GNU Guix transactional package manager and distribution — GNU Guix
guix.gnu.orgthedeadwalking4242
in reply to a Kendrick fan • • •msherburn33
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •Having one
}too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.msherburn33
in reply to a Kendrick fan • • •While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don't get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that's actually build for the task.
SkaveRat
in reply to phantomwise • • •en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_…
American computer programmer
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)lapping6596
in reply to SkaveRat • • •phantomwise
in reply to SkaveRat • • •HayadSont
in reply to phantomwise • • •Sure, some packages are outdated. But in terms of percentage of up-to-date packages, it's (AFAIK) the best out of any distro repo. And that's perhaps even more impressive of a feat when realizing it also sports the biggest repo. For actual stats: repology.org/repositories/stat…
Repository statistics - Repology
repology.orgphantomwise
in reply to HayadSont • • •iopq
in reply to phantomwise • • •msherburn33
in reply to phantomwise • • •It's reproducible, so random updates are a no-no. You can however just dump the Git URL in your
flake.nixinputs and then override thesrcof the package with that. The source gets updated when you donix flake updatenext time. Something like this:phantomwise
in reply to phantomwise • • •Finally managed to enable VSCode extensions without doing it imperatively or using home manager I'm so happy I could cry 😭 😭 😭
It actually wasn't even that bad, I'm just terrible at understanding documentation I guess
atzanteol
in reply to trevor (he/they) • • •You absolutely do. If you build a container and publish it you will pull down that exact thing every time. How is that not "reproducibility"?
You no what though? Scratch that - who gives a fuck? Bit-for-bit reproducibility takes far more effort than it's worth anyway. Even NixOS isn't completely reproducible. It's a false goal.
It's well more than good enough you mean.
Nobody really needs that.
utopiah
in reply to trevor (he/they) • • •Feels very arbitrary. Why would I care about say MacOS versus FreeBSD or say NeXTSTEP (just to be provocative)?
Anyway I'm being pulled away from the actual argument, the "bare metal" argument is about performances, isn't it?
utopiah
Unknown parent • • •trevor (he/they)
in reply to atzanteol • • •steeznson
in reply to ikidd • • •aim_at_me
in reply to steeznson • • •smiletolerantly
in reply to steeznson • • •Think about it like this:
steeznson
in reply to smiletolerantly • • •Sibbo
in reply to ikidd • • •iopq
in reply to ikidd • • •steam-runit and it just workssmiletolerantly
in reply to iopq • • •SolarBoy
in reply to smiletolerantly • • •This command will just run an executable file on nix. Normally only executables which are installed from the package manager will work.
appimage-runis another option. Which can be used to run, you guessed it, appimagesiopq
in reply to SolarBoy • • •SolarBoy
in reply to iopq • • •iopq
in reply to utopiah • • •gedhrel
in reply to trevor (he/they) • • •utopiah
in reply to iopq • • •msherburn33
in reply to ikidd • • •Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just
:(e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a
services.foobar.enable = trueand sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing thatsearch.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.
There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.
NixOS Search
search.nixos.orgheraplem
in reply to msherburn33 • • •There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who's familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that's even close to mainstream).
builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at leastnixpkgs-libif you want to get any real work done._typefield or some such.${or''? I have to look them up every time.SolarBoy
in reply to msherburn33 • • •Using a language server like nixd also helps a lot with auto completing packages and options in your config.
Apparently people are also working on the nickel configuration language to address some of the nix limitations and difficulties.
trevor (he/they)
in reply to gedhrel • • •I'm not quite sure why you think pointing out someone's confidently incorrect claim that containers do give you reproducible environments means that I fetishsize anything?
But if you genuinely want to know why reproducibility is valuable, take a look at reproducible-builds.org/.
I was quite happy to see that Debian and Arch have both made great strides into making tooling that enables reproducible packages in recent times. It's probable that, because of efforts like this, creating reproducible builds will become easier/possible on most Linux environments, including traditional container workflows.
For now though, Nix Flakes are much better at enabling reproducible builds of your software than traditional containers, if you can suffer through Nix not being documented very well. This article covers some more details on different build systems and compares them with Nix Flakes if you want more concrete examples.
FWIW, I think that containers are awesome, and using them for dev environments and CI tooling solves a lot of very real problems ("it works on my machine", cheap and easy cross-compilation for Linux systems, basic sandboxing, etc.) for people. I use containers for a lot of those reasons. But if I need to make something reproducible, there are better tools for the job.
Reproducible Builds
reproducible-builds.orgchaospatterns
in reply to ikidd • • •I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!
But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it's easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn't mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I'm going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don't want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here's how you configure it. Here's how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn't figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.
I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can't recommend this to my tech friends because if I'm confused they will be more so.