NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 5, 2022 8:21 UTC (Sun) by ms (subscriber, #41272)
In reply to: NixOS 22.05 released by larkey
Parent article: NixOS 22.05 released

Yeah, I use NixOS on desktop and servers. There are bits of it that are fantastic and I would never want to go back to distributions without.
But, there seems to be a culture of "if it compiles it must work". The lack of attention to detail, the level of breakage, the degree of thoughtlessness about making breaking changes is distressing.
That said, let me be clear there are fundamental parts of it I think are brilliant, and probably a lot of the issues I find are due to too few resources and money, and if I had time to help properly I would.

NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 5, 2022 8:48 UTC (Sun) by Athas (subscriber, #104895) [Link] (3 responses)

I think NixOS is an interesting case because the underlying Nix tech is perfectly able to support highly conservative releases with backports in the vein of Debian or RHEL, but in practice I think most people (myself included) use NixOS as a rolling release distribution. I suspect that NixOS's very good technical infrastructure (Nix itself, and a very effective GitHub-based Nixpkgs contribution model) allows a fairly small team to support a huge package repository - but ensuring consistent *quality* (e.g. rigorous testing and reliable backporting of security patches) requires a level of manpower that NixOS just doesn't have. This is a problem that could be solved with money, but it isn't yet.

To put it another way, NixOS is run on a relatively shoestring budget, but you can't tell because the tech is so good that it looks much larger than it really is.

NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 5, 2022 12:57 UTC (Sun) by mstone (subscriber, #58824) [Link] (1 responses)

This seems exactly right to me. I got into nix and NixOS about ten years ago specifically because nix is the highest “power to weight ratio” tool I have yet seen for running (literally) more software since it makes it so easy, especially now that flake-enabled nix interpreters are readily available, to make each incremental new program/update work without breaking any of the others.

(Note: if this idea intrigues you and you’d like to learn just enough nix to understand how this works, then you might like this tutorial that I wrote last year: https://mstone.info/posts/nix-tutorial/ codifying the “why + how to learn to read nix” thoughts + advice I had found myself giving in years past.)

NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 6, 2022 15:19 UTC (Mon) by mplanchard (guest, #156458) [Link]

As an intermediate nix user (use NixOS as main OS and use nix for $company dev environment, have built a few recipes), your tutorial is very helpful, thanks! I have bookmarked it as something to share in our nix learning resources at work. Would love to see it expanded further, if you find the time!

NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 14, 2022 23:42 UTC (Tue) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

The testing is always the problem with stuff like this. Nix pretends to allow lots of different combinations of flags and versions, but if you don't actually have the bandwidth to test the particular combination you really can't say it works! I'm not really sure what the value provided by big collections of meta-build scripts is if there isn't some kind of unified integration testing of everything. Like if I'm assembling all the dependencies of my software I either want some known-supported collection of stuff, or I would rather just compile everything myself and redistribute it (think flatpak or buildstream).

Basically, I'm not sure it's just a case of nix having breakage because they are "underfunded", maybe it's just essentially impossible (or at least economically extremely infeasible) to maintain a large collection of packages with such a large number of knobs.

NixOS 22.05 released

Posted Jun 7, 2022 10:49 UTC (Tue) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link]

Absolutely, I *love* the approach Nix does (and also watch closely what RedHat does with Fedora Silverblue/CoreOS and wish we could somehow combine both approaches tbh). It's a hugely refreshing new take on what a Linux distro is and I think/hope will influence the future of desktop operating systems.