NixOS is the best operating system I absolutely cannot recommend to anyone

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 130 points 6 months ago (4 children)

This article is spot on. Fantastic operating system with a clear concept of how it should be done. And great for people that want to fight for it. But everything you want to do that's slightly off the path is a 3 hour research project in documentation that's pretty damn poor. It eventually wears you out.

[–] Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.works 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Nixos user here for 4 years.

Yep

Its legit you want to try sway window manager?!?

Sway = true;

You want to change the keybinds and make it declarative.

MAY GOD HELP YOU.

Files.home

Is what u want and it took me 3 hours to find that

[–] rozodru@piefed.social 27 points 6 months ago

I love NixOS but it really does make the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I even take "vacations" from it. Like right now for example. I switched back to Arch for a bit as I found myself spending too much time playing around with my various nix configurations/modules and also getting frustrated in trying to get some random application to work. So went back to Arch so I don't have to think about stuff.

the beauty of NixOS is I can go back to it and be exactly where I left off in like 15minutes. I just need a break from it.

[–] higgsboson@piefed.social 21 points 6 months ago (2 children)

This reminds me of something I might have said of pre-alpha Gentoo days.

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[–] teft@piefed.social 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Is there no forum or discord for the distro? Or a self help book. Way back in the day that’s how i did shit on slackware. Irc and books.

[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

There's a manual, a discourse (forum) and a Matrix. And an unofficial subreddit and a Lemmy community. As well as two wikis and a large number of random people writing blog posts and tutorials.

This might be a hot take but honestly I think the documentation quality isn't the problem. You can point to specific topics that aren't well documented but that isn't unusual. What's unusual is how NixOS is designed and how working around its quirks requires close to distro maintainer levels of knowledge.

Most distros don't require several pages of documentation on how to install a Python application. NixOS on the other hand...

[–] teft@piefed.social 9 points 6 months ago

Most distros don’t require several pages of documentation on how to install a Python application. NixOS on the other hand…

Ooof. Ok now I understand a bit. Thanks.

[–] KryptonNerd@slrpnk.net 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

There's a forum, which is fine, but the people on there are very insistent that you should do things "the nix way" and if you don't go all in on that then you get chastised.

[–] higgsboson@piefed.social 5 points 6 months ago

you should do things [their way] and if you don't go all in on that then you get chastised.

As is tradition.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 5 points 6 months ago

A bit of friction when going off the beaten path is generally a good thing. Some people always take this too far though

[–] These_Opposite4228@programming.dev 3 points 6 months ago

Pretty sure there's an unofficial discord server with around 16k members.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 41 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Damn right. And the Nixos community forums are full of people unwilling to accept this. They will gaslight you into thinking you're the problem. "Just do this", as I'd it's completely obvious and you're dumb for not realising that. Of course if they find out you have some ideological incompatibility with them, you're out anyway.

NIXOS really needs a fork. One that embraces or rejects flakes outright. One that stops inviting ideological battles. And one that embraces documentation.

[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Do you have some specific threads in mind? Maybe I'm lucky to never click on the bad ones but my experience is that nobody is more cynical regarding Nix/NixOS jank than the long time NixOS users. You might not always get the answer you want, because it is very jank and doing some things will get you into trouble. But people pointing that out isn't the same thing as gaslighting.

Guix SD might be worth a look, it seems to be just straight up better in many technical regards. It has no flakes, comprehensive documentation and a blessed way to manage user homes. At least as long as you don't really need WiFi of course...

[–] arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 6 months ago

I'm using GuixSD on my desktop, and while I think it's better in terms of creating stuff that doesn't already exist in upstream repos, there's so much functionality missing that's present in nixpkgs and random flakes online that for the average person complaining about Nix jank it's very likely not worth the effort. On the bright side they released 1.5 recently so you no longer have to use a 3 year old image (that likely doesn't work right if your computer is too new) or a nightly one to get things running.

[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

At least as long as you don't really need WiFi of course...

Hey, now – the NonGuix repo. exists!

_

For those unfamiliar, it contains software with proprietary elements that otherwise can't make it into the Guix software repository, à la non-free for Debian.

You can get the normal Linux kernel and all the hardware compatibility you'd typically expect easily through NonGuix.

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[–] somegeek@programming.dev 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You are thinking of the better alternative, guix

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[–] PastelKeystone@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There are forks of Nix. Perhaps you might like Lix.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 4 points 6 months ago

I haven't yet found out where its major differences lie. And it seems like they haven't taken a firm stance on flakes (yes or no). They also only forked the interpreter, not nixpkgs. A good step, but their documentation wasn't good, the last time I checked.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The problem is that NixOS achieves all of this by breaking assumptions that almost all Linux software relies on. Most Linux binaries assume the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard exists, and they expect interpreters and libraries at fixed global paths.

This is a problem of those applications, we began to make appimages that do not make those assumptions and work in NixOS directly. (And this also means it works in places like alpine where a lot of those binaries wont either).

People like to throw the FHS around but the reality is that not a single distro follows it fully, I wouldn't rely on it to be the same in the near future at all.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Most of these are still relevant issues afaik, so yeah... appimages are just not a solution for everything. Same as stuff like flatpak and snap. These are nice for when you just need some little standalone app that doesnt do a lot of compute heavy stuff, but they will never replace native implementations.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The points in the screenshot are just false and outdated, the guy even says that it doesn't work on every distro lol

This is signal made with sharun working on ubuntu 12.04 a 14 year old distro: https://imgur.com/a/1f5S0P7 The distro is so old that internet no longer worked lol, had to use a flash drive to transfer the appimage.

we use a lot less storage than flatpak and this comparison is outdated, we have reduced the size of a lot of apps since then.

I actually did a quick test installing an alpine linux container and about 10 GUI apps vs appimage and appimage used less storage, now this comparison was flawed because I later realized that the alpine stable repo was super old and for example GIMP was pulling the gtk2 version instead of the gtk3 one (which brings all of gtk2 into the system instead of sharing the existing gtk3) but you get the idea of how close we are.

For updates and desktop integration use AM or soar

but they will never replace native implementations.

Eden makes its appimage using sharun, they made it with PGO optimizations on it which has a ~10% increase in FPS.

native implementations wouldn't bother doing this, in fact PCSX2 had to tell people to not use the official archlinux package while it existed, because archlinux compiled it with generic flags which was horrible lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ikyovw/pcsx2_official_arch_linux_package_not_recommended/

This is also the reason why this benchmark showed appimage performing much better, you are free to optimize your application, while distros packages, flatpak, etc you often have to deal with packaging policies that do not allow this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/u5gr7r/interesting_benchmarks_of_flatpak_vs_snap_vs/

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

At this point, FHS feels more like a hindrance to me. Also, it was made in a time with very limited disk capacity and personal computers weren't much of a thing yet.

[–] khleedril@cyberplace.social 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

@MonkderVierte @Samueru_sama I don't think the standard (more like a guideline) is bad in itself: consistence of file-system use across applications is good for all our sanity. It is the assumption that all applications use it rigorously that is the problem. The word is SHOULD, not MUST.

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[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 18 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Lol love the title.

I feel the same about KDE on Wayland, it's amazing but it's not stable enough yet.

Took my laptop to work and it had a stroke when I plugged it into the office monitors

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 36 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's weird.
To share a contrasting experience, I run KDE on Wayland on a laptop with two physical monitors with different rotations and three virtual monitors with different resolutions and it all Just Works.

[–] Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have a Nvidia GPU, and the monitors are work are old-ish

Might be the issue 🤷‍♂️

[–] baduhai@sopuli.xyz 6 points 6 months ago

I have a Nvidia GPU

Ah, well I wouldn't blame any of your graphical issues on any Linux software then.

[–] mereo@piefed.ca 9 points 6 months ago

I'm running KDE Wayland on an AMD 9070 XT video card and I've absolutely no problem. Perhaps it's your system because Wayland has been heaven. Linux is finally a modern OS.

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Which version of KDE Plasma?

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[–] pleasureyoucanmeasure@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Switching is hard, but going back is impossible.

[–] ruffsl@programming.dev 9 points 6 months ago

I never want to go back to an OS I can't diff or track under revision control. I just love being able to solve an issue once and move on without worrying about if I'll forget all the minutiae of changes I made to my customized system when it eventually comes to migrating workstations or replicating across my computers.

[–] timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I also think- how often am I borking or reinstalling my desktop?

It's a good idea but I've been running the same system for years and years. All that effort goes kind of unused. I replicated most of what I'd need in a single ansible playbook over the years that didn't take long. In the rare event I need to reinstall at all.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've made it so my home directory and root are two different partitions so whenever I need to reinstall I still have my customization data around

[–] timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago

Same. If I ever had to reinstall that makes it even easier anyhow.

[–] null@piefed.nullspace.lol 13 points 6 months ago

This title is exactly right

[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Didn't they start going anti-woke at some point? I was very excited about nixos when i started trying it and then between the weapons sponsorships and some anti woke stuff i read about at the time, i moved on

[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure that description makes a lot of sense. Nixpkgs/NixOS is a fairly large community project. Some of the contributors are certainly anti-woke (although quite a few of those were banned from official spaces a while back), and some are MIC employees (Anduril is somewhat infamous with a seat on the so-called "steering council"). That's not especially unusual by itself, and you can definitely do worse than "one guy is a MIC employee" (just ask the GNU or suckless folks). What is unusual is the very public meltdowns that happened surrounding it, including the moderation team resigning. The community fortunately seems to have survived all of that though.

Anyone curious can read through the most recently active governance related thread and the rest of the discourse meta category. Outside of that the subreddit had an issue with Lunduke spam at the time, but this has since died down (and the posts were removed). I don't frequent the Matrix (official) or Discord (unofficial) so maybe those are really bad and I don't know about it, but from my experience I honestly have little to complain about.

[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 7 points 6 months ago

Having someone from the MIC with a seat on the steering council is pretty fucking damning on its own ngl

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Personally, i dream of a stateless, tag/attribute-based, tree-less operating system. "directories" would not be neccessary but a tag could be displayed as one in file managers. Want to load a library? type:library, name:xyz it is.
Stuff is there on the disk anyway, you just have to identify it.

But that would require the whole system and the tooling made for this.
But maybe we get there; since the young generation isn't used to file trees anymore.

Edit: ok, scratch the kernel, it could work.

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You described a file system. You can make that system easily and put in any os. You don't have to make and os for one feature.

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[–] PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 4 points 6 months ago

Wouldn't it just require a kernel module rather than a whole kernel?

[–] entwine@programming.dev 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I wonder how many Nix cheerleaders are aware of OSTree based systems like Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, etc? They provide the same immutability guarantees, but none of the pain and standards-defiance of NixOS.

I think Nix (the package manager) is a much stronger sell than NixOS. You can use Nix to install your apps on top of another immutable OS, whereas otherwise you might go with Flatpaks, containers, AppImages, etc. It's certainly better than adding Homebrew or some other manager like Pacman.

For devs, Nix is nice for people who can't or don't want to use containers for any reason (or want to use both!). I just don't see anyone benefiting from using NixOS except for Nix addicts.

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[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 5 points 6 months ago

it undermines decades of Unix experience

Which I don't have. So my interest got piqued.

package everything you want to run

Sounds like a way to finally make my attempts at using Linux organized

bulletproof rollbacks

McMahon red glowing eyes

[+] poinck@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Fedora offers a very good set of choices.