Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

22 points

everyone

Now that’s what I’d call a stretch…

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10 points

Indeed, why would I switch, already have been running NixOS for 10+ years.

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I’ll edit. That was clearly a stretch

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18 points
Removed by mod
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13 points

this comment reads suspiciously like it was written by an LLM (eg ChatGPT). was it? please don’t do that!

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3 points

I tried asking for sources before, and they were all wrong, either non-existant or not even about the topic, some were just random urls.

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0 points

Do LLMs give citations? Otherwise, I could agree.

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8 points

Do LLMs give citations?

do they ever!

(The citations in this comment appear to be all real links about NixOS, but they are not particularly relevant to the places in the comment where they’re cited.)

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1 point

Bing ‘chat mode’ (read: hooked GPT-4 to their search engine) does in essentially this format.

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-2 points
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@dessalines@lemmy.ml @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml @wazowski@lemmy.ml @k_o_t@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml @kixiQu@lemmy.ml an admin is telling me not to use LLMs. Is this the official stance of this instance? If so, please let me know so I can find another instance and add it to the rules, if not please choose admins that actually enforce the instance rules without making them up.

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14 points

I don’t know whether just using an LLM is a problem. But in your case I would say the fact you used one and didn’t indicate you did. If you indicated the answer came from an LLM, then the trust in the answer could be weighted accordingly by each user.

That’s my opinion at any rate.

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12 points

If OP wanted a response from an LLM, they would have typed their question into an LLM. The least you could do is label it as such.

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8 points
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thanks for clarifying. i’m deleting your generated comment per rule 4 (spamming) as well as two other generated comments you posted elsewhere; if another admin wants to undelete any of these i would be surprised.

please do not post LLM-generated comments without clearly labeling them as such. imo this is common sense, and doesn’t need its own rule, rule 4 is sufficient.

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1 point

Under the soon to be enacted EU AI laws such a bot would be limited-risk application (interaction with humans), the requirements for a text bot aren’t particularly high but also non-negotiable from a best practice POV: Stating front and centre that it’s an AI generated post. It’s also best practice to fulfil criteria necessary for high-risk systems voluntarily, the more you can fulfil I bet the less hostile people are going to be.

The library of congress has an executive summary of the thing.

(EU sources alas are a bit iffy at the moment there’s the commission version and the parliament amendments, haven’t seen a consolidated version yet. When will politicians start using proper VCS)

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1 point

You suck

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0 points
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The admins did not remove the comment, a community mod did. Mods can impose further restrictions on their communities on top of instance wide rules (within reason of course), including banning LLMs. Lemmy.ml at least does not have a blanket ban on LLMs, but generally it’s expected that, 1, you should not post LLMs excessively, we mainly want to host discussions by humans, 2, you should disclose it’s from an LLM and which one it’s from, and preferably add to what it says with your own comments or analysis. If it’s a mix of LLM and your own writing, say so at the start of the comment, but if the community directly disallows LLMs then you shouldn’t post it there at all.

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2 points

I would love to have #4 on Arch / EndeavourOS.I recently had my Scribus install (SVN from the AUR) break due to Arch moving to some newer library. There really isn’t an easy way to solve this AFAIK.

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2 points

This is clearly a chatgpt post that you made references for

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1 point

Do you use Nix, personally? Also, it’s crazy that I found this post while thinking about distro hopping.

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4 points

The above poster seems to use more ChatGPT than Nix, personally.

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13 points

I used NixOS for a couple of years. My experience is like this:

  1. It is a rolling release (mostly)
  2. You write a declarative configuration for your system, e.g., my config will say I want Neovim with certain plugins, and I can also include my Neovim configuration
  3. It is stable, and when it breaks it is easy to go back
  4. Packages are mostly bleeding edge
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The configuration stuff seems great. I guess it reduce the struggle of porting a full config from one pc to another right ?

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6 points

Yes absolutely. It is really great. It is also a source of frustration, e.g., missing configuration options, non-obvious options and so on. Overall it works well.

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1 point

You can even define configurations for different systems/hosts/users from a single place. I’ev atomized my config and I can reuse lots of parts for my different machines. Also my user config is nearly identical (except hardware specific things).

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5 points

Note that there’s both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.

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4 points

Important to note that NixOS has both a rolling release and point release version.

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1 point

Are you still using it and happy with it? I’ve been increasingly using single purpose dev VMs in a server, and a declarative configuration system would make the process of spinning them up faster and more robust. My current shell script system is clunky, and I’ve been looking at Ansible.

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3 points

Not using it anymore. Although I’m thinking about going back to it. The NixOS learning curve is a bit more steep than most other distros.

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2 points

What are you using instead?

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-1 points

Wow, that sounds really cool (specially the config thing). I’ll have to try it sometime.

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11 points

It’s in no way “everyone”, just a vocal minority.

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5 points
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I use Arch NixOS BTW.

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2 points

Why do I get nothing but first dates?

By the way, I use NixOS.

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9 points
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Here’s the straightforward version of why I use it:

  1. The entire state of your operating system is defined in a config file, and changes are made by changing the config file. This makes it super easy to reproduce your exact system many times and to know where all the many different configuration elements that describe your system are located.

  2. Updates are applied atomically, so you don’t have to worry about interrupting the update process and if it fails, the previous state of your system is still bootable. By default every time you change something, you get another option in the boot menu to roll back to.

  3. Making container-like sub systems is super easy when you’re familiar with nix, so you can have as many different enclaves as you like for different software versions, development environments, desktop setups, whatever without taking a performance hit. Old versions of stuff are very accessible without breaking your new stuff.

  4. The package manager has a lot of software and accessing nonfree stuff is straightforward. Guix looks rad, but nix ended up being the more practical compromise for my usecase. I didn’t want to have to package a heap of software the moment I made the switch.

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1 point

This very much. I used to have lots of unchecked config and state files everywhere on Arch. Now everything is checked in and wiped on boot so if something breaks after a reboot i know what broke.

Like how the opengl rendering did due to nixpkgs version differences

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