Seems like this distro is getting a lot of traction recently. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good?
Your whole system is defined in a file called configuration.nix. This file
describes everything about your system: all packages installed, which Desktop
Environment / Window Manager to use, and also configuration for almost
everything (e.g. zsh or neovim). When “switching” (which is basically
installing/updating the system), Nix looks at the configuration and changes your
system according to what you’ve declared in the configuration.nix, installing
or uninstalling packages for instance.
So, the state of your system is “declared” in a single file, which can be tracked in git or backed up wherever. If you have mulitple systems, you can also share parts of your config between them, which makes configuring and customizing stuff a lot easier.
There are a lot of other aspects, but thats the basic gist of it
That sounds really cool… so you could just take that file, do a clean install of nix, then put that file back and it’ll install all your old packages and stuff?
Not just your packages, but all your config as well.
Also, I believe updates are transactional, so if something goes wrong in the middle it can just abort and your system isn’t left in an inconsistant state. And if an update breaks something you can easily roll back to a previous version.
Basically yes
you could also go so far as to wipe your root partition (except for some selected dirs) on every boot, although I don’t do that myself: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
Is it a big learning curve? Is this the emacs equivalent of OS configuration/installation?
edit: another question - Could I play around with it by installing in qemu and if I like that, take my configuration.nix from qemu and install it as my main OS?
I’d say it’s a pretty steep curve unfortunately, and nixOS is also not perfect, mind you
- The nix language (that is used for the configuration) itself has sometimes weird syntax. It’s also a proper functional programming languages with all bells ans whistles that brings
- The documentation is less than ideal (to put it mildley). Most of the times you need to search reddit (rip) and the forums to find how to do certain things.
- Nix is not FHS
compliant. Basically everything is a symlink to some file in the nix store,
located in
/nix. Packages installed with nix are patched to work that way, but things not installed with it might not run out of the box
As for trying it out, yeah copying the config from the vm should work (except for maybe some hardware-specific stuff). remember to backup your stuff just in case lol
It’s also a proper functional programming languages with all bells ans whistles that brings
It’s really not. It has no runtime for starters; it’s a pure expression language. It can’t i.e. read stdin, open a socket or do an arbitrary syscall.
The end result is always data. You could and can turn every sensible evaluation of Nix into JSON.
There are indeed side-effects but they’re indirect; implied by the data that is the actual end result of an evaluation of Nix expressions. If your expression evals to a derivation (data), Nix will create a .drv file for you for example. They’re well defined and not arbitrary though.
Could I play around with it by installing in qemu and if I like that, take my configuration.nix from qemu and install it as my main OS?
Absolutely. That’s how I got started ;)
If you install Nix (the package manager) on your current system, you can actually directly build a vm from a config file via nixos-rebuild build-vm.
