Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I'm pretty sure the best middle ground that currently exists is the various "immutable, snapshot to upgrade" distros out there.


Yes and no. It has some of the same advantages, but not the declarative definition of a system.

For me (even though I use NixOS the desktop) there is a difference between desktops and servers. I can set up a desktop pretty quickly - install a bunch of flatpaks, checkout a bunch of dotfiles and I don't do it often.

Also, popular desktops like Fedora tend to be far more polished than the NixOS desktop, which has all kinds of glitches. Just to name two current ones: (1) gdm login will fail if you are too fast and log in before WiFi is up (usually you are thrown back in gdm, sometimes the session freezes up completly); (2) fwupd firmware updates usually fail.

On the other hand, on servers and remote development VMs, the setup work is annoying because I spin up/down machines far more frequently and managing them as pets gets old pretty quickly. So NixOS is much nicer, because you can have a system up and identical in 5 minutes. You could of course approximate it with something like Ansible on non-NixOS.

Though, I think the differences will become smaller since Fedora-based immutable systems will switch from OSTree to bootable containers soon [1].

Of course, you can use Nix on another immutable distro than NixOS.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/


Depends on your use cases. I use Nix all the time at work but I don't use NixOS there at all. (I'd like to, but there are barriers and it's not a priority.) Distros like that don't address my use cases at all.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: