But it is not always building the same derivation results on Linux and NixOS itself. In other words, I would like to declare what packages are in my main system profile, other user or service profiles, or specific nix-shell-style environments, but I would also like packages and configurations to resolve to more abstract paths where package files can be injected (in various views of the file system) rather than statically resolving to the nix store. Sure, there is a core domain-specific element you would need to learn either way. NixOS has a much bigger community, NixOS has a bigger package repository, and both of these are growing faster for NixOS than for Guix. There are several things I dislike about the Nix expression language. NixOS is different to most of the distros that you may have tried before. NixOS has been installed. 08:31 < jbo > Hi there - I'm trying to rebuild my system following hard disk failure. Only hardcore! It is definitely not for everyone. We’ll see. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. I solved the problem myself, but I realized that the biggest barrier for user to fix the problem is to build the image themselves **before getting inside the image** to do nixos … While I’ve kept my OS configurations in git repositories for a long time, NixOS has made (more-or-less) reproducible systems significantly easier. And yes, your own cache size will also grow very fast! NixOS makes it safe to test potentially dangerous changes to the system, because you can always roll back. Good luck, NixOS and friends! Forget about Chef, Puppet or Ansible! I hated NixOS for this reason, and didn’t return to it … As of a couple years ago when I tested them, Guix was just not sufficiently stable and mature while NixOS was. However, part of this is also painful because nix-shell builds an environment where everything resolves to /nix/store paths. This idea works since the path of Linux ld is well known for each distribution. NIX CONFIGURATION LANGUAGE It is functional language which name is also Nix and it is a core of this system configuration. Boot media is still available. and immutable package managment and NixOS is a Linux distribution built from the ground up using Nix. NixOS is an independently developed GNU/Linux distribution that aims to improve the state of the art in system configuration management. I’ve been a long time Linux user, and most of that time was spent on Arch Linux. Nix Packages GitHub repository will be your second home, where you’ll be looking for examples of Nix expressions, configuration approaches and other examples. 1. I often do this out of convenience and because examples that I cargo cult do it too. While it hits most of the points I’ve mentioned I want in an ideal package mananger, it is more static than I would like for many applications. And, of course, Guix has its own set of design decisions that can complicate some of my use cases©. This is especially painful when working with software that doesn’t have a good built script for a clean step, so you need to nuke the repository to get back to a buildable state. Each derivation represents software, plugin or a library. I think the library and header stripping behaviour is a great option, and perhaps the right default. How to manually replicate/reproduce/obtain the sha256 hash specified in Nix with fetchgit or fetchFromGitHub? Away. I’ve tried many times on many operating systems to mix multiple package repositories, and in particular the stable and unstable branches of the main OS repository. Your choice is traditional Linux and Docker! There are some issues that annoy me about NixOS, however. I’d like to see them both succeed and borrow ideas from each other. NixOS 20.03 Markhor upgrade NixOS 20.03 is out and here is what I had to do to upgrade. If you don’t go out of your way to specify an exact commit to get your packages from, your environment will change as your nix-channel updates and it will not be reproducible. DevOps-friendly. NixOS on a T420 Nix and NixOS are two technologies that my eyes have been on for a few years. Only Nix expressions! ☎: Imagine if my phone also had all of these advantages – actually saving all my configuration in a git repository, shared code with my laptop, and transactional package management even for the core OS – no bricks, even if the battery dies while updating the kernel. You can roll-back installs to get to a known-good state, and you can keep several “generations” of your OS installed to go back and forth at will. I will continuously update this article each time I’ll face a new weird and challenging task that makes your life much harder if you’re using NixOS instead of traditional Linux distributions. However, my OS (packages included) doesn’t take up terribly much storage, so doubling that for the extra flexibility would not necessarily be impractical. Two main branches are offered: current Stable release and Unstable following latest development. Good luck! : Ok, perhaps my complaints go too far in this section. That’s not doing “the right thing”. In NixOS, the entire operating system, including the kernel, applications, system packages and configuration files, are built by the Nix package manager. nixos-manager isn’t in nixpkgs yet, so you’ll have to build it using…Nix! And, God, do not try to run Nix in Docker! At this point I see blog posts about NixOS so frequently that perhaps there is little left to say. For those problematic EFI setup, or for a portable NixOS setup, it is possible to make use of the default path of the OS loader. In that case, this largely boils down to the static vs dynamic tradeoff discussed in the conclusion. Try to think why. This is easily the worst aspect of NixOS. They are solving the same task, but NixOS is way less popular. This issue is not merely an inconvenience for lazy software experimentation and development. Kinda joke, but really, think twice when you’re making decision to invest your time or money in it. If you want to dynamically write and evaluate code that interacts with and affects your window manager, shell, and other things in your “global interaction environment”, it really needs to run outside of a nix-shell environment, but NixOS makes it really hard to run some things without nix-shell. But unless I logged on to the system in question, I would never see those emails! I'm not able to run it the first time due to incorrect kernel being used. Ideally, one system could provide both, but that would perhaps imply two versions for each package – a dynamic version and a static version. Previously I’ve usually built custom “packages” by checking out and building the git repository in my home directory rather than going through the trouble of making an OS package then scripting its build and installation. These cookies do not store any personal information. Rather than building a bespoke language with yet another standard library for strings, lists, dictionaries, math, filesystems, IO, error handling, etc, Guix just makes a DSL library that provides a set of features relevant to packaging and system configuration on top of Guile Scheme. $ # In this example we will look into how to test your NixOS configuration $ # We will create a simple configuration with the `hello` package installed $ # system wide and check that the `hello` world binary works. I’ve long enabled a (local-only) email server on each machine to give me warnings about cron job failures, warnings from mdadm (the RAID health monitor) and smartd (the disk health monitor), etc. But mind, you don’t just need to pin the packages, you need to use pinned functions when building the environment (eg pinnedPkgs.mkShell, not pkgs.mkShell), or some core packages from the non-pinned nix-channel package set will still come through and ruin everythingυ! I am a huge fan of Arch, some of my favourite features are the following: Very vanilla. And most of my experience with NixOS is bad experience. Please head over to read all about my Linux/Unix history.In a Gist: I have about 20 years experience in using and managing Linux and Unix machines ranging from various Linux distributions, as well as *BSD and by extension Darwin (a.k.a Mac). This design decision really hampers dynamic workflows unless each component needed for the workflow is already well packaged and configured for NixOS. nixos-rebuild --upgrade boot Reboot to enter your newly-built NixOS. Problems start happening when you spinning up your personal cache, which is used, for example to store your proprietary build artifacts. ... NixOS: How do I change my group and clean up the bad configurations?Helpful? That combination makes NixOS a reach too far for new users. Check out popular companies that use NixOS and some tools that integrate with NixOS. The quick fix: Just comment out the configuration option in the ssh config file, you probably don't … Let’s put a fake interpreter on NixOS machines! There is no configuration option to opt-in to having these files. NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Try to think why. I setup my NixOS in a Pi a couple of months past using the NixOS Wiki. 2. For some of these I make the unideal but expedient choice to use a few proprietary packages. NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager.It uses declarative configuration and allows reliable system upgrades. The Nix expression language isn’t that bad, but it’s a shame that it’s yet another weird little language you need to learn to accomplish one niche thing. How so? Want to quickly build software in your home directory, trusting that your all-purpose development machine configuration already has the right libraries installed to “just” build it (because you purposely installed practically all of the development libraries in the repository particularly to make this one activity easy)? Why I use NixOS. If things go wrong you can reboot, select the previous generation, use nix-channel to add the old channel, and then nixos-rebuild boot to make the working generation the default; I think it's more reliable to rebuild than to use nixos-rebuild --rollback. For instance, NixOS machines can place an entry at /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 for a custom binary that can help resolve dynamic libraries at runtime to libraries within the /nix/store. NIX CONFIGURATION LANGUAGE It is functional language which name is also Nix and it is a core of this system configuration. This is great for reproducible development and experimentation. In other words, rather than linking store paths into generic paths like $PREFIX/lib, programs find libraries, executables, etc, through environment variables (like $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH) full of dozens of paths directly into the nix store. Often I find little projects online that I want to try out. NixOS of course supports general container technology as you mentioned in your first post, so you can also use that to your hearts desire. The fhsUserEnv feature provides a more dynamic environment with non-store paths, but it only goes half way since things like pkgconfig still point directly into the store. > This is a good thing. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. NixOps, the NixOS cloud deployment tool, allows you to provision and manage networks of NixOS machines in environments like Amazon EC2 and VirtualBox. The link is in previous paragraph. There are some issues that annoy me about NixOS, however. #+begin_src bash nix-build -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-unstable #+end_src. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. I wound up making heavy use of the Nix Pills , which are a series of posts that show you not only how Nix package management is implemented, but why it works the way it does. (c) NixOS.org. This post highlights my reasoning behind switching to NixOS. This is not unique to NixOS, exactly, but now that I have all of my (non-phone. When you try to summarize all your thoughts around the topic you want to cover in a post, you’re starting from simple Google search. NixOS developers, you are awesome, but this issue is just atrocious. Maybe, but not all hosts behave the same, e.g. It always ended in tears. But we’ve collectively made poor technology choices before, and there’s no reason to believe we’ll stop now. Site generated This is mostly a documentation issue. the frozen blog tool. Although NixOS started as a research project, it is a fully functional and usable operating system. At all. Common syntax of describing it looks like this (nginx derivation example): If yes, get ready, you’ll not be able to live in the system without writing something like that. So why am I not using Guix? NixOS is older than Docker. I generally agree with Guix’s moral stance that proprietary software is bad, but purposely making it extra difficult to use in your OS doesn’t generally mean people stop using proprietary software, it means people don’t use your OS. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Read More. As a shared submodule of each configuration repository, this service only needs a couple lines in each machine’s main configuration.nix file to enable and configure. I’ll start my article from the biggest myth about NixOS. Some UEFI implementations are just bad™. This was originally posted as a Reddit comment.. Linux/Unix History. The official NixOS wiki has basically similar recommendations, and I found the NixOS manual to not be super helpful here. But if that’s not the case, then this design deserves this frustrated rant and more. It is declared and provided to you by the system design, that you’ll get the same version of any software package from the derivation. It’s easy to make limited environments with exactly the packages you want. I’ve started and thrown out a few drafts of a post about NixOS over the last of couple years. Some symptoms include: 1. That said, it’s quite likely that I’ll switch some day, since I think the language choice (and various other decisions) in Guix are much better than in NixOS⚔.