[TriLUG] nixos recommendation

[Casey Ransom via TriLUG]

I've been using NixOS personally and professionally for nearly 5 years now.
I think if I were hand cuffed to not use it, I'd start looking for other
work because it's such a game changer when it clicks.

Personally, I love it for the atomic upgrades and the rare occasional
emergency roll back and that I have a configuration management system
without pulling out chef/ansible/etc at home.

At work, I use it to generate disk images for AWS, with fully baked
software and configuration (including secrets, they are decrypted via KMS)
for no-fear deployments and code updates. It replaced an aging and brittle
chef setup. When our rails service needs extra horse power, the auto
scaling group has new machines up and ready in rotation in around 60
seconds, 30 of that is booting and the other 30 waiting for health checks
to start to clear.

The secondary sales pitch, even if you don't go in for the full NixOS
experience, you can install Nix (the package manager) itself on Linux/macOS
and run all the stuff that's painful to introduce to your current distro.
Multiple Ruby's installed without conflicting gems, python2 + 3 living
happily together, java versions, no problem. And if you haven't seen the
light after exploring, you purge /nix and some other files in your .profile
and /etc and it's gone.

-casey




On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 12:58 PM Ken M via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> Haven't been around much but just thought I would share a distro
> recommendation for the distro hoppers among us. Nixos. Now granted it is
> not a new distro but I think the new ideas it brings are pretty cool.
>
> I won't rehash what you can all google about it, but some highlights.
>
> 1. As a person who deals with solaris a lot as well as plays in the bsd
> world enough the zfs on linux in nixos works really well, and setting up
> zfs on root from the install is easy.
>
> 2. Again coming from the BSD world, the separation between the os and
> the installed packages as far as where the userland sits /nix/store is
> similar but even more separated than the bsd view.
>
> 3. Being able to allow a user to install software without sudo and just
> for them is nice, and to allow that user to use the unstable branch for
> their specific packages is nice. If it had a gui that would be even
> nicer but not a big deal.
>
> 4. The declarative single point configuration is nice as well especially
> when setting up multiple machines. sync the config and off you go to the
> next machine.
>
> 5. All of the above leads to a very good combination of a stable base
> system and allowing very bleeding edge software for the things you need.
>
> Some cons though:
>
> 1. Not for newbies. Plenty of cli and config file changes to get things
> right.
>
> 2. The way it ignores to just abandons the standard file system layout
> can be annoying, a hinderance, and make setting up certain things a
> total failure if you don't embrace the nix way of doing things.
>
> 3. the nix language for configuration can take a little bit of a
> learning curve.
>
> On another random side note, after years of my usual openbox + compton +
> nitrogen + tint2 setup, I have come to just embrace the base kde plasma5
> install.
>
> Anyway it has been a while since I have been active around here and I
> haven't seem any one mention this distro here. I think it fits the space
> for those who want something with the newness of say fedora, sid, or
> arch, but want the ability to have a more stable base.
>
> Ken
> --
> This message was sent to: Casey Ransom <cransom at hubns.net>
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