Nix hype has been high the last several months for some reason despite it being around for awhile. I think DevOps guys are just now discovering it or something.
Disclosure: I haven’t used it. I’ve just watched a few videos and have been following the hype. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
My understanding is that it is similar to the idempotency that Terraform brings but on a OS, packages and code level.
Basically you define (in a file) everything you want on the OS from packages to settings to custom repos and it installs everything so even if something goes sideways and say your server gets hacked, you just start over not from scratch or hopefully a clean fallback image but with everything you need installed out of the gate on a fresh install.
Can also be super useful for ensuring your whole team is using the same setup. No more reading a manual for this one obscure firewall that some random guy setup. Your firewall (or whatever else) was installed and configured out of the box, plus it is the same org wide.
Learn a dynamic lazy functional programming language first and then start building a flake without much help or documentation because that’s what you should be doing and the default installation doesn’t use that mechanism. The docs you find will assume you understand category theory already.
About few years later you are a god and there is no way you’re going to use anything else ever again.
He didn’t explain it well. The whole system lives on a ymal file and is easy to read. Documentation as code. If you have a working system then you’re set, it’ll never break. Adding software uses it’s own dependencies and will never break other software. It also has roll back features like snapshot/btrfs, during bootup you can go back to a previous version of your system. With the ymal file it makes it easy to clone the setup from others or for other systems of yours in the future, just have to generate a hardware file in most cases.
I replied in another comment about some of it’s features. I love it, its really hard to break even compared to my previous Arch install using auto snapshots on btrfs.
Arch linux is the gateway drug that leads to NixOS
How is Nixos? Are there clear advantages over a traditional Linux distro?
Nix hype has been high the last several months for some reason despite it being around for awhile. I think DevOps guys are just now discovering it or something.
Disclosure: I haven’t used it. I’ve just watched a few videos and have been following the hype. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
My understanding is that it is similar to the idempotency that Terraform brings but on a OS, packages and code level.
Basically you define (in a file) everything you want on the OS from packages to settings to custom repos and it installs everything so even if something goes sideways and say your server gets hacked, you just start over not from scratch or hopefully a clean fallback image but with everything you need installed out of the gate on a fresh install.
Can also be super useful for ensuring your whole team is using the same setup. No more reading a manual for this one obscure firewall that some random guy setup. Your firewall (or whatever else) was installed and configured out of the box, plus it is the same org wide.
Learn a dynamic lazy functional programming language first and then start building a flake without much help or documentation because that’s what you should be doing and the default installation doesn’t use that mechanism. The docs you find will assume you understand category theory already.
About few years later you are a god and there is no way you’re going to use anything else ever again.
Source: been a user for the past four years.
I understood maybe three things in your reply so NixOS probably not for me.
He didn’t explain it well. The whole system lives on a ymal file and is easy to read. Documentation as code. If you have a working system then you’re set, it’ll never break. Adding software uses it’s own dependencies and will never break other software. It also has roll back features like snapshot/btrfs, during bootup you can go back to a previous version of your system. With the ymal file it makes it easy to clone the setup from others or for other systems of yours in the future, just have to generate a hardware file in most cases.
How ya liking it?
I replied in another comment about some of it’s features. I love it, its really hard to break even compared to my previous Arch install using auto snapshots on btrfs.