Seeing this prompted me to do an experiment.
There was a time when Nixpkgs was smaller than the AUR. And, until recently, Nixpkgs was larger than the AUR but still smaller than the combination of the main Arch repos with the AUR.
As it turns out, the current total package count for Arch and the AUR is 85,819.
For nixpkgs unstable, that number is 88,768.
NixOS 23.05 Stable has 83,740.
And considering the mention of 9,147 new packages and 4,015 removed packages, that would mean that 23.11 would have a total of:
88,872 packages. This is more than the current figures for Nixpkgs unstable, but this is going off data from separate sources (NixOS devs and repology, with repology still being slightly outdated)
And, as such, I think it’s fair to say the winner is (drumroll please)…
The USER for having such incredible distributions, giving him the vast breadth of choice for what distro matches their workflow best.
Though the difference is AUR packages aren’t officially supported or tested and are commonly out of date. They also need to be built on your system
I’m new to NixOS. Do I have to do anything extra to update NixOS? Or do I just update my flake and run nixos-rebuild switch --flake like I normally do to update packages?
I’m not sure (I’m about to install it for the first time - on this computer) - According to this all you need to do is:
# nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-23.11 nixos
# nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
What if I just want to upgrade some packages? Like not change channel, but Firefox needs an update? I’m not op and don’t use flakes btw
If using flakes you could just for instance add another input. You can also set the input URLs to specific states of the nixpkgs repository by eg referencing specific commits. Then, you should be able to just, e.g., pick Firefox from unstable, another package from the current stable channel, and maybe a broken package from a pull request fixing said package.
If you are not using flakes you can also add system wide channels. IIRC you can then import these channels into your configuration.nix and select packages from the corresponding channels. But here the channels/inputs are not part of configuration itself in contrast to when using flakes.
You can add something like this to your config: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48831392/how-to-add-nixos-unstable-channel-declaratively-in-configuration-nix
You just need to have it fetch the tarball for nixos 23.11 instead of nixos unstable.
You need to update your inputs so that you’re using the 23.11 branch of nixpkgs instead of the old one. In my experience, a couple of things will break, but there’s usually warnings about it.
Oh okay. That makes sense. I should have mentioned im using unstable as my inputs. So I assume I just need to update.
Edit: I just ran neofetch and apparently I’m already running NixOS 24.05. 👍
Does Nix need user namespaces, and does it allow good Sandboxing like Podman or Flatpak?
I’ve used flatpak in the past, and although you basically give up the declarative aspect they worked fine as far as I remember
Nix packages arent containerized by default. But since every depenedency is clearly defined. there are tools wrap packkages using bublewrap, or tools build layered docker imahes
But building packages happens in sandbox
Great thanks! So Fedora+Nix (maybe some hacky way to symlink it to /var/nix on every boot and it can run on Atomic too)+bubblejail (there is a COPR now for use in secureblue) could be a great setup!
Any info about namespaces? Hardened kernels block these for valid reasons. Flatpaks can use bubblewrap-suid, Podman is supposedly not compatible (not sure about that)
Okay, folks. NixOS needs your help. No bull. I’m talking documenters, designers, coders, package maintainers. Why? Because the NixOS community has a lot on it’s plate right now.
Like I can understand why flakes haven’t become standardised, why it’s still marked as unstable, even though it’s pretty much feature complete, and that’s because nix is a complex environment builder and the current contributes are taxed to the max.
But what is nix?
Nix’s job is to create reproducible environments where you can put any library, any service, any application. It does this through compile time flags and modifying ELF headers to isolate applications on a system to their own, exclusive UNIX path. These are linked together as clojures, or a dependency graphs, that can share libraries, applications and services intetchangably with each othet, or use another version or patched version without causing any dependency conflicts.
You can fire up pretty much whatever you want and it will be reproducible elsewhere. It’s like if you took a package manager, build environments, as well as VMs and micro services and make them kiss.
You can spin up a nix environment on any supported system and expect it to run 1:1. This however breeds complexity and there’s a lack of NixOS contributors.
If only you spin up a nix environment on a VM or use it to replace your current build systems (because nix can use several build systems in one single environment), and then contribute back with some changes to nixpkgs, then you are helping to bring about the most powerful deployment tool since kubernetes.
No joke. Check out how you can contribute, because at the end of the day learning nix is gaining a new superpower.
This bug still exists (using nix-channel without name causes errors, a basic feature IMO) so watch out.
Unfortunately nix still needs work on it’s UX.
Yeah. The UX is not in a great state. This is not an euphemism though, I think the UX is OK for advanced users, but getting used to it takes time.
Honestly given the choice I prefer the status quo, good fundamentals and clunky UX compared to the other way around – it’s all volunteer work and that’s a finite resource.
