Opinions of nix and nix-os?

[Danathar]

Although all of around here are pretty much .deb people being on MX and all, I'm curious if anybody here has been playing around with the nix package manager and/or nix-os and what their opinions are? Seems like there are a lot of people who really like it.

[CharlesV]

I played with nix a few years back and found myself both disoriented and somewhat confused. (Please keep in mind, I have a lot more history with deb and apt based systems, as well as xfce, cinnamon & mate.)

Personally, I found the package manager very hard to use, ( i am sure after time it would be easier, but it was just 'off' to me.), and things were so different I was spending a large mount of time trying to do 'simple things' . (This is the killer for me with most distro's ;-/ if I cannot make things happen pretty quick... they are gone.)

I did like the ability to manage updates in a rather 'modular' fashion, and rollbacks were nice. In all of my attempts it was pretty stable, but I continued to get the impression that it was 'all bolted together a little awkwardly'. Just felt off to me, and I really didnt find the entire experience very nice.

The nix experience felt a lot like my bsd attempts. While I really like bsd in many ways, the consistent 'tough to tweak and bend", and the time it takes me to configure things like I want... continues to be a serious issue and one that frankly I am not interested in taking the time for, with out some type of real gratification.

What I have come to realize with linux is that I must have a point of real connection and enjoyment - how to do, how to repair, how to 'sexy it up' , and how to drive it ... each of these can happen on a small scale as I learn it, but it *must* start to happen pretty quick and I have to like things about it ... or I am gone. For me... nix couldnt achieve this.

[DukeComposed]

Although all of around here are pretty much .deb people being on MX and all, I'm curious if anybody here has been playing around with the nix package manager and/or nix-os and what their opinions are? Seems like there are a lot of people who really like it.

It's alright. Nix tends to provide newer versions of its packages much faster and with less fuss than Debian-based package repos. The real advantage of Nix is that it strives to make installing packages consistent and reproducible, so upgrading foobar-1.2.3 won't overwrite foobar-1.2.2 and you can still access the old version for as long as you keep it around. The Nix way of doing this is through a complicated "store" mechanism that is basically the same concept as the old "slashpackage" format that never caught on, but if you put ~/.nix-profile/bin in your PATH you will hardly notice.

I've had problems with some of the more complex packages in Nix on MX Linux. Things like Kdenlive simply do not function correctly out of the box, and so a Flatpak is a better option in these cases. In all, Nix works well for installing command-line utilities, of which I use several. Graphical applications can certainly work, too, so you can enjoy current versions of browsers and KeePass password storage programs and such, but be prepared for some Nix packages to simply not quite behave after you've installed them on a different distro. I find it's mostly hit, with a few misses.

With a combination of Nix and Flatpak, you can very likely put together an MX system with current packages much faster than waiting for Debian to get around to it, and without asking the MX package maintainers to supersede a Debian package for you. Remember to run "nix-channel --update" and "nix-env --delete-generations old" every now and then and you should be happy. Happier, at least, with newer versions of software than I ever was when I was still trying to kitbash different Debian release repos together in /etc/apt to get an updated version of nethack to work.

I don't have much of an opinion on NixOS. There's "infrastructure as code" with things like Terraform and Ansible. Now there's "operating system as code", where with NixOS installs and maintenance are a matter of writing and deploying one single config file that defines precisely how the machine should behave. Adding a package means editing the file. Changing a network interface means editing the file. You get the idea. This largely eliminates the need for backing up anything on your system other than your personal data and that config file. If you want to clone your setup, you find a second machine and re-run the NixOS installer with your config file. Boom. Done. You can start copying your MP3s and wallpapers over to it now. As much as I like the idea of a consistent and reproducible Linux installer, and it's admittedly great for software testing for obvious reasons, NixOS is a systemd-enabled distro, so it's a non-starter for me.

[Danathar]

Although all of around here are pretty much .deb people being on MX and all, I'm curious if anybody here has been playing around with the nix package manager and/or nix-os and what their opinions are? Seems like there are a lot of people who really like it.

It's alright. Nix tends to provide newer versions of its packages much faster and with less fuss than Debian-based package repos. The real advantage of Nix is that it strives to make installing packages consistent and reproducible, so upgrading foobar-1.2.3 won't overwrite foobar-1.2.2 and you can still access the old version for as long as you keep it around. The Nix way of doing this is through a complicated "store" mechanism that is basically the same concept as the old "slashpackage" format that never caught on, but if you put ~/.nix-profile/bin in your PATH you will hardly notice.

I've had problems with some of the more complex packages in Nix on MX Linux. Things like Kdenlive simply do not function correctly out of the box, and so a Flatpak is a better option in these cases. In all, Nix works well for installing command-line utilities, of which I use several. Graphical applications can certainly work, too, so you can enjoy current versions of browsers and KeePass password storage programs and such, but be prepared for some Nix packages to simply not quite behave after you've installed them on a different distro. I find it's mostly hit, with a few misses.

With a combination of Nix and Flatpak, you can very likely put together an MX system with current packages much faster than waiting for Debian to get around to it, and without asking the MX package maintainers to supersede a Debian package for you. Remember to run "nix-channel --update" and "nix-env --delete-generations old" every now and then and you should be happy. Happier, at least, with newer versions of software than I ever was when I was still trying to kitbash different Debian release repos together in /etc/apt to get an updated version of nethack to work.

I don't have much of an opinion on NixOS. There's "infrastructure as code" with things like Terraform and Ansible. Now there's "operating system as code", where with NixOS installs and maintenance are a matter of writing and deploying one single config file that defines precisely how the machine should behave. Adding a package means editing the file. Changing a network interface means editing the file. You get the idea. This largely eliminates the need for backing up anything on your system other than your personal data and that config file. If you want to clone your setup, you find a second machine and re-run the NixOS installer with your config file. Boom. Done. You can start copying your MP3s and wallpapers over to it now. As much as I like the idea of a consistent and reproducible Linux installer, and it's admittedly great for software testing for obvious reasons, NixOS is a systemd-enabled distro, so it's a non-starter for me.

I have to wonder what using NIX package management would give me on MX over just using Distrobox. I've been using Distrobox to get packages that I need for some time and it works great.

[DukeComposed]

I have to wonder what using NIX package management would give me on MX over just using Distrobox. I've been using Distrobox to get packages that I need for some time and it works great.

If you like Distrobox, no one's going to ask you to switch to Nix. From the Github page for Distrobox this appears to be similar to Bedrock Linux, which also allows for heterogeneous mixing and matching of Linux components. You can run Ravenports if you want. I've investigated Nix as an alternative package manager to give me newer versions than standard Debian repositories can give me and there have been pros and there have been cons, which I outlined.

[NightCoder]

What I have come to realize with Linux is that I must have a point of real connection and enjoyment - how to do, how to repair, how to 'sexy it up', and how to drive it ... each of these can happen on a small scale as I learn it, but it *must* start to happen pretty quick and I have to like things about it ... or I am gone. For me ... Nix couldn't achieve this.

I can only agree with that, it actually describes the expectations that most users have towards Linux today. Not every distro lives up to this, some overshoot the mark without listening to the users and that doesn't go down very well with many. Unfortunately, the philosophy by which the file system is structured cannot always be described as ideal.

[CharlesV]

yup !