NixOS is making me less afraid(entropicthoughts.com) |
NixOS is making me less afraid(entropicthoughts.com) |
Not because it's suddenly got better, but because the learning curve has collapsed to a flat line. My problem with linux has always been how un-user friendly it is. Constant tinkering around with config files and googling how to fix problems. Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.
There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.
I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.
But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.
I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.
That said: the main fear here probably comes from the enormous size of nixpkgs and the overall cost of the infrastructure. Most individual package definitions should be relatively easy to maintain. So perhaps it isn’t such a big deal, if Nix infra built packages more slowly and reduced the scope of the repo then it could probably cope with having fewer maintainer hours available and less funding.
Still, something about it feels like a Tower of Babel situation. It goes just far enough beyond most people’s understanding to feel like it has fractal complexity. (Although it really isn’t that bad once you’ve spent enough time with it.)
These days I am more interested in simple, self-contained systems like OpenBSD than impressive feats of engineering. I still prefer Nix for most “work stuff”.
i realised long ago this is usually a self-inflicted problem. Some of us (myself included) cannot resist tinkering with something that works reasonably well. When we use Windows its hard to tinker so we leave well along. Linux lets you tinker so we keep trying to reach perfection, and that breaks stuff.
I think that tinkering serves a purpose. If you don't fully understand your tooling, you won't be able to fix it when something breaks. Tinkering teaches you that.
Also, you might miss out on improved workflow by leaving things alone.
The whole reason I use FOSS is that I don't some big tech architect to decide for me how my computer should work.
Claude has definitely helped to reduce this negative!
Some of it is real pain points, and those are annoying that they aren't baked into the distro from the beginning.
What does this have to do with Nix, though? If you’re using an LLM to run everything, you don’t even need as many layers of abstractions or tools.
Compared to poking at a mungy ball of accidental state where every change introduces complexity for the future.
I remember trying to remap keys in Linux Mint and install Chinese language keyboard were both major PITA requiring Claude/ChatGPT, while on Windows I could do it without any help in few minutes (the keyboard in seconds)
I'm interested in NixOS, but I'm at an age where I just want things to stay stable and change only when they really have to. I already have a lot of big mandatory changes from life itself, I don't need more :)
I'm writing this in good faith. I'm genuinely curious and interested in trying it again.
It's a thriving open source ecosystem. There are forks, there are differing opinions, and in-depth discussions.
But, universally, everyone agrees that nixpkgs, independent from any implementation, is the real value of nix.
That said, things change. OpenSSL 4, glibc 2.44, gcc 16, etc which then requires a bit of tweaking every now and then.
(oci-container-configuration
(environment
'("CRON_MIN=2,32"
"LISTEN=0.0.0.0:80"
"OIDC_ENABLED=0"))
(image "freshrss/freshrss:edge")
(log-file (container-log "freshrss"))
(extra-arguments
'("--pod=freshrss"))
(provision "freshrss")
(respawn? #t)
(volumes
'("...")))I've struggled with the same problem, and Coolify helped me with it. It supports auto-deployment from GitHub via a bot integration, so you don't have to manage Github Actions. It can also deploy from a Docker Compose file, which is good for self-hosting other people's projects.
Of course you still have to have a list of instructions on how to set up your server with Coolify. But at least it's a finite set of instructions, meaning you don't have to update it every time you host a new project.
I have a container running on GGoogle Cloud Run within the free tier. It runs runs twice weekly as well as once a month (for monthly news summary) to parse through specifically setup Google News RSS feeds and then trigger an email with key news items I'm specifically interested.
Gemini is used for determining which articles to include and exclude from the email summary based on my predefined criteria. It works really well in being able to keep on top of specific industry/tech news I'm interested in.
Also everything is running in kubernetes isolation so my OS is immutable and consume much less disk space than NixOS (I don't have too much of it and future is looking bleak in this department)
This is true, and the same is true of shell scripts, but isn't it true of nix as well? If you update nixpkgs and then install something, you have the same chance of getting a new version of it as you do with the `sudo apt-get install` in the Dockerfile, no? I had once looked into using nix to intentionally install older versions of software and it was not as easy as I had hoped.
I imagine people do this somewhat regularly at least to e.g. occasionally pull in a package or two from unstable when they normally run a stable system.
If you need to build a container image as if it was a year ago, you're hosed.
Miniflux homepage really undersells it.
If the web interface is too minimalist/archaic for you, there's plenty of alternative frontends available you can deploy along. Personally, I'm using reminiflux (inspired by Google Reader).
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-26.05/nixos/modu...
https://github.com/Xophmeister/backer-upper/
I believe there are NixOS options to do this periodically -- which is even easier -- but I specifically wanted on-shutdown backups.
services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ config.services.freshrss.dataDir ];
You can assign a value to `services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ ... ]` in multiple places throughout your system configuration. When applying the config, all the values will be merged into a single list.
This is important because other standard tasks besides backup (e.g. firewall, monitoring, ...) also require per-service configuration. If every one of these tasks had only a single place where you needed to put a megalist of services (which is basically how `/etc` works on typical Linux distros!), this would quickly scatter the configuration that pertains to FreshRSS over N different files, making it hard to track where everything lives.
Can never tell with these submissions.
I tinker with one ARM based tablet, which never works quite right but because its a secondary device with limited use anyway its not a problem. My work laptop does not get messed around with unless necessary.
That said, cool if pacman and AUR work for you, no need to change just for the sake of it!
The worst my family have had was an MS surface running a rolling release distro because it was the only way to get the touchscreen working which failed at a bad time. Now switched to a more stable distro and looks OK.
On the other hand most laptops and all desktops have been trouble free. Even running a rolling release distro (Manjaro) has been fine on a laptop that was designed for Linux (and sold with Linux preinstalled).