[TriLUG] nixos recommendation

[Ken M via TriLUG]

I don't have that kind of time in by any means. So far setting up 2 home
use machines has been a breeze. Some minor differences in their use case
but not enough to prevent starting from the same configuration.nix file.

So far the few snags I have hit where more needing to learn more of the
nix way to do things, or where overdue changes.

An example of the latter, mostly I am a developer, I use vim for my
primary editor/IDE. I use vundle to handle my vim plugins and one of
them I use is YouCompleteMe. YCM just does not work well on nix, and
frankly that is more of a statement of YCM as YCM has given me headaches
here and there across different platforms.

So I figured it is finally time to jump to neovim. Which makes sense. Be
used to a vanilla vim for admin tasks and my init.vim for nvim has all
the goodies. Plus that switch lead to using deoplete instead for vim.
But on top of that I go all the way nix I could ditch the vundle path
and allow nix to manage my vim/neovim plugins.

That is just an example of the overdue change, to explain myself better.

Ken

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 06:26:45PM -0500, Casey Ransom via TriLUG wrote:
> 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
>
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