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Why did NixOS gain so much traction lately, considering its 20 years old? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/linux
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

It’s finally ready for mass adoption, IMO. Also, things take a long time to catch on and now that flakes are fairly stable and a lot of pedagogy is popping up in the form of other people’s configs (and the documentation is being actively improved to hopefully someday meet the high standards of Arch), people feel empowered to try it out.

IOG uses it for their entire stack which is packed with incredibly solid (IMO) software engineering decisions from top to bottom.

I tried it because I wanted to run a Cardano stake pool and develop DApps for the Cardano ecosystem. Their build-from-source instructions made me realize how much better it would be to install it with Nix instead of the cargo cult/curse of the current era, a Docker container.

[–] Feathercrown 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

and the documentation is being actively improved to hopefully someday meet the high standards of Arch

It has a LONG way to go

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Totally agreed. That’s a big ask, though, because Arch’s docs are the gold standard.

I’m working on converting to impermanence mode this week and let’s just say I’d be done by now if the answers were even close to the quality found in Arch’s wiki.

[–] JustAnotherKay 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is the one thing stopping from swapping to Nix. I would love to have a drop in file for my mini PC, but right now staying in the arch ecosystem is just easier

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Don’t worry. NixOS users are spiritual brothers to Arch users, IMO, and we’ll eventually get to the point where it’ll be easier with canonical examples. 🤝

In the meantime, try out the nix package manager while still using Arch to build a package here or there if you’re so inclined.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I think the network effect is a big part of it. People start seeing nix configs being used for projects, and nixos config examples are getting easier to find.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

IOG?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Input Output Global

They’re the company that created Cardano. They’re well-respected for their code quality and the use of formal methods and academic peer review to develop their software. They started out an enemy of most Haskell devs then won many over with their massive open source contributions to the Haskell developer experience. Their Nix based Haskell dev environment is THE best way to use Haskell with Nix.

They used to be called IOHK or Input Output Hong Kong which is still reflected on their GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It’s finally ready for mass adoption, IMO

No way. It's still a specialist OS. There's no way I'm putting this into the hands of a linux newbie or even the average linux user. There config still doesn't have a UI, the flakes vs non-flakes debate is still in full swing (nixpkgs doesn't have flakes), the doc is far, far, far from user friendly, writing a nix package is still not easy, and so much more.

Nix for sure was (and probably is) ahead of its time, but the UX is amongst the worst I've experienced - and I've written init and upstart services and configured my network with ipconfig before networkmanager was stable.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] Zangoose 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Mass adoption doesn't necessarily mean Linux newbie. NixOS seems to be targeting the DevOps crowd with its stability/immutability -- that is, people who would be comfortable building their system from a config file that doesn't have a UI. They're already basically doing that with other tools.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I don't know a single devops who uses it. Not a single person in the tech companies I've been in had even heard of it. When I presented it to resolve problems it could resolve, one response was "but I watched a video that said it's hard to learn" (one from distrotube, I think) and another was "it doesn't work on mac, does it?" and that was that.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I find it actually incredible that you don’t know anyone in DEVOPS that uses it. Either you’re at a giant company with a custom stack that replicates its functionality (Meta employees that I asked didn’t know about it) or you don’t talk to other devs. It’s like THE devops tool nowadays (only taking a second place to Docker/OCI).

It does, in fact, work on Mac, FreeBSD, Windows, and actually almost anywhere that SSH can be run.

This comment has a closed source license.

[–] Feathercrown 5 points 2 months ago

“it doesn’t work on mac, does it?”

How is this person even in devops lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

🙄

Did you just post a license for your humblebrag soapbox rant about NixOS?

Edit: I’ll leave some points where I agree since you’re very fixated on/preoccupied with who won this debate (or something). In the long run, most Nix users are wishing for a complete rewrite of NixOS with Nix’s modern approach codified as standard. After all, to your point, Nix is just a massive pile of Perl and Bash under the hood. It could unquestionably be more capable if they had the benefit of hindsight (or a proper type system built into the language) like GUIX which uses Scheme as their DSL has. AFAIK, though, Nix flakes are a feature that GUIX badly needs.

For GUIX: Does anyone know about content-addressed derivations in GUIX? I figure that might also be a place where Nix bests GUIX but perhaps some GUIX(pronounced geeks) can correct me before I search for answers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They actually believe AI scraping lemmy will follow the link to the license, understand it, and except their comment.

[–] grue 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think they believe that; I think they either (a) think a human lawyer would understand it during the class-action suit after the the AI scrapes it anyway, or (b) more likely, they're doing it to make a point as a matter of principle.

Either seems pretty fucking reasonable, to be honest!

[–] barsquid 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's just noise. Assuming US jurisdiction where many of the AI companies are based; either AI scraping is fair use, in which case the license is meaningless, or AI scraping is not fair use, in which case they already have the copyright.

[–] grue 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

or AI scraping is not fair use, in which case they already have the copyright.

What? How would an AI company have copyright over @[email protected]'s comment? That makes no sense at all.

[–] barsquid 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's the other way around, onlinepersona already has the copyright. Asserting that the copyright is non-commercial changes nothing. The default is non-commercial. The default is nobody can use it. They are applying a more permissive copyright than the default.

[–] grue 1 points 2 months ago

Ah, I see what you mean now.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

a lot of the art and science of teaching is popping up?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Tutorials and teaching materials

for those with a limited vocabulary and an unwavering need to correct someone that isn’t necessarily wrong.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I have never seen pedagogy used to mean teaching materials.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Well, now you have.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hi, teacher here: pedagogy is 'the method and practice of teaching', and that practice involves teaching materials.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago

still seems wierd to me. materials do not sound like practice at all and I guess method as they are written often but like I feel like pencils are materials. just feels wierd based on the definition.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

Speculating here, but similar tools like Ansible, Terraform an other IAC tools have only come up relatively recently.

Having this built-in is appealing to many people.

[–] grue 19 points 2 months ago

Containerization / declarative configuration management / reproducible builds / immutable distros are hot right now because people have for a long time been sick and tired of their shit breaking when they upgrade, and are starting to realize that encapsulating changes in atomic transactions and keeping track of them better is a better way of doing things.

In other words, NixOS is riding the wave generated by the popularization of stuff like Docker, Ansible, CI/CD, etc.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Containers are now ubiquitous and people wanted their systems to be similarly easy? Silverblue/similar immutable OSes fizzled out and people started trying NixOS? Probably many factors, to be honest.

Personally, I needed a new OS for my gaming computer, and I decided to experiment with NixOS after having tried Silverblue in the past.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Don't forget that silverblue in the launch was a pain in the ass, because of applications not adopting portals and flatpak, so you needed to layer a lot of things, that wouldn't work because it uses /usr (that's read only) or scripts that do the same thing, since them a lot of things got modernized

[–] iopq 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I installed it when it finally had an installer and I've been using it for a couple of years. I think that was the final thing to push it into mainstream (of Linux distros, widely known in narrow circles so to speak)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Same reason Roblox is only now popular after 20 years: because it was complete shit for most of the time it has existed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Correction: Roblox used to be good, and is now shit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Roblox is just an engine, there are tons of shit games and many good ones. The Monetization however is quite shit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Growth have been fairly organic . number of contributors grew by 28 percent this year. there are a lot of users so given that a percent of them will do some form of advocacy that will probably lead to more users and there will be a relatively large amount of people saying they adopted it.

[–] Neon 0 points 2 months ago

I'd like to say it's because I have such a big influence on the Linux Community, but I honestly don't know