• vga@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    I actually got NixOS after the latest time I tried it. But I also got that I don’t want it, Arch is much simpler in all the good ways.

    And perhaps something like https://github.com/kiviktnm/decman can some day give us part of Nix’s power without going all-in with the functional declarative thingamadoodle.

    • archer@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Wow thanks I was wondering for a while if something like this existed! I’m very happy with regular Arch, but I am very curious to try both an immutable/atomic and a declarative distro. At least the second I guess I can kina replicate now with this. Another rabbit hole to go down I think. :D

  • Malix@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    So, I’m an arch-btwistan, what does nixos do for a gamer/youtuber/low-tier-wannabe-musician? Legit asking, because I really don’t know what makes nixos tick, and the (very little) I’ve read doesn’t really explain the benefits of it

    • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Everything about your OS is defined in a config files and can be rebuilt. You break something you don’t need to do a complete reinstall if you can’t figure it out. Just rebuild the last working configuration. Sharing builds with your friends is easier.

      For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults

        • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Basically but it’s better, nix has a unique way of doing the underlying the logic which as is own benefits. Also since nix is not a container it doesn’t have any of the speed penalties that come along with that. Since nix is functional as well, it means all operations can be undone. So where you might te build a docker image from scratch or by using a A/B system like other immutable distros it allows nix to just modify the system while it’s running with minimal side effects.

          • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            nix has a unique way of doing the underlying the logic which as is own benefits.

            Honestly, this is what I like least about it. I do not like unique, single-purpose Domain Specific Languages. To me, requiring use of a DSL that is not like common languages used for similar purposes is a major detractor.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults

        you clearly haven’t used EndeavorOS then, since there everything just works.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      nothing imo, it’s main benefit is making reproducible environments, imagine you need 10 machines to have the exact same things running on it, setting up each one would be a PITA and keeping them the same is near impossible, nixos solves that problem.

      it’s not gonna do anything for you, most people just want a working OS system on your PC so that you can do the things you need to do, if you have that, there is no reason to be fucking around with nixos.

    • Chef6652@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Very well built patches and ways to share them. This is a good thing for gaming as we can try bleeding edge like Arch. But without having to rely on AUR or scripts to copy locally. Thanks to Nix Flakes you simply reference the flake someone shared (after double checking what is in it) and rebuild a NixOS derivation and voila, patch installed. I installed a complete SteamOS in 1 minute with this, reboot and everything works. Even with your locally signed in Steam account 👌

    • tux7350@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Imo the worst part of nix is how it turns into this chicken or the egg scenario. Let me explain, nix is very good at reproducing things. It ensures that all things are the same when installing a piece of software. Once someone writes a nix module, generally speaking, it “just works”. You can always take that nix file and get it to run the same way on another machine. But since most gamers/musicians don’t give two shits about reproducible software, it doesn’t get packaged. And with no packages they will never be interested to get into nix.

      As I write this though I realize, many open source projects have struggled with getting contributions from the community. Personally, I just think nix solves the issue of “idk, it works on my machine” better than anything I’ve seen. Being able to reproduce software and stop dependency issues is a very valuble thing, just not for everyone.

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’d been hearing a lot about NixOS so I did a VM install. It wanted me to setup my own partitions manually without even giving preset sane defaults like I was back in 1994 installing Slackware.

    Nope. My OS is a tool, not a lifestyle.

    • turnipjs@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      How long ago did you try? You should try again, I did not have this experience setting up with the graphical installer a few weeks ago.

      • Laser@feddit.org
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        4 months ago

        Encryption? Also you’re assuming there’s only one block device…

        assuming the person before did not just mean partitioning, but also all other storage-related tasks

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      This is the opposite of me. I always get nervous when I don’t have precise control over how the disk layout looks. I explicitly decided for the non-graphical installer when I first downloaded NixOS

    • Wooki@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      it wanted me to setup my own partitions manually

      You’ve obviously never used nix, it’s GUI installer can auto configure just fine.

      When your OS AND apps are declared and stateful a lot of risk and complexity is removed. Configuring is just a bad experience with poor usability and worse documentation.

  • hacktheegg@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Tis fairly good, don’t like how badly it works with grub tho (which I refuse to change)

    This makes arch/nixos a difficult combo to set up

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      Does it? I have two VMs on remote VPS servers that use GRUB because of no UEFI and I had no issues

      • hacktheegg@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        Might be cause the PC in question I’m testing on does have uefi,(which nixos recommends system senior loader for)

        My argument for using it is: it works very well for every other Linux distro, so it should work well with nixos too, uefi or not

  • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    One thing that no-one tested is the overhead of all the sandbox, like, each module, lybrary of program run in a sandbox(some times they tweak the source code not need the sandbox) so I wanted to see the overhead of all of that

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        I don’t understand, if you run a program inside the sandbox and the program ask for a library, the kernel need to map the library from inside the sandbox to the program, that overhead that I’m talking about

        • Laser@feddit.org
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          4 months ago

          This is not how NixOS works. Programs directly link against libraries in the store. There is no sandbox by default when running the binaries.

        • ivn@jlai.lu
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          4 months ago

          But it’s not run in a sandbox. I’m not sure where you get this from.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I tried it once and gave up after realizing the necessary mental gymnastics to do simple things like installing something.

    • sntx@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I’ve looked into the same, sad it’s not viable yet…

      Well it’d need declarative configuration IMO, so maybe something like tvix would need to be integrated first. That could also get us to being DSL agnostic.

      Bur damn, RedoxOS (impl) is sexy.