[HN Gopher] NixOS 24.05 "Uakari" Released
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NixOS 24.05 "Uakari" Released
Author : opengears
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-05-31 19:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nixos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nixos.org)
| acheong08 wrote:
| I really want to switch to NixOS at one point. I've had a try
| about a month ago but having not read much documentation
| beforehand, it took too much time for me to get everything the
| way I wanted. Fedora with Hyprland has been working just fine for
| me so maybe I'll hold off until things become easier.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Not super likely this will happen any time soon. In the closed
| source world profits drive development and ease of use drives
| profit.
|
| In the open source world what drives development is some neck
| beards obscure opinion on user friendliness. Which likely still
| involves a command line tool and a config file with an acronym
| as the config parameter.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Command line tools are cool for me. I just need better
| documentation on the behavior of the CLIs and exactly what
| they do without having to dive into the source code. One
| reason I've held off is because I'm not familiar with C++.
| Hoping to fix that over the summer
| bsimpson wrote:
| > things become easier
|
| I'm not even sure what that would look like. Nix is such a
| departure from other Linuxen that I don't think it will
| magically become easier; I expect you'll always need to
| understand Nix to use it. Maybe better syntax highlighting etc.
| would help?
|
| I expect it's much easier to learn Nix in the age of LLMs than
| it would have been before.
| k8svet wrote:
| There are multiple competent LSP implementation for nix so
| hopefully that's not the blocker! Nix has rough to pick up,
| but has a comfort to it once you broach it.
| rav3ndust wrote:
| i haven't had a chance to have a play with the alpha yet, but
| there is a project that is working on making nix "easier" for
| beginners. its called snowflakeOS: https://snowflakeos.org/
| bsimpson wrote:
| There was a bunch of recent drama surrounding a woke
| takeover and/or fork of the Nix ecosystem. Browse /r/NixOS
| if you want details.
|
| I haven't followed it closely and I don't want to
| misrepresent, but as I understand:
|
| - They pushed the founder of the project out of the BDFL
| role he'd held for 21 years, and
|
| - They started a new "governance" process that included
| evicting people who disagreed with their tack/tact. It was
| done in the name of "inclusivity," but it sounds like the
| bar for excluding people they disagreed with was very low.
|
| The Snowflake guy (Jake Hamilton) is part of the takeover
| crew. He's got a fork in-waiting if the takeover of
| mainline Nix doesn't go the way they want:
|
| https://aux.computer/
| rav3ndust wrote:
| thanks for the info! i had heard about some drama in
| nixworld, but hadn't done much reading into it yet. this
| is a good starting point.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Documentation!
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| as someone who has been working to make nix my main system
| for several months now, there are some very clear areas of
| improvement that would make things easier:
|
| - [any] documentation, the majority of nix modules are
| undocumented and so the only way to figure out what settings
| are available is to find and read the source code (and even
| then it could be using a module to convert the definitions to
| the target config format, in which case there's even more
| guessing, but at least the official documentation of that
| package gives you something)
|
| - coding standards; lots of modules have different variations
| of camel case, snake case, adjective-noun, noun-adjective,
| etc so it's not clear what the correct format of a setting is
| for an arbitrary package
|
| - flakes just need to be both an official feature and set to
| be the default way to interact with nix, it just has too many
| upsides
|
| - Better errors, the current errors are just horrible to read
| and you end up picking out 1 or 2 spots in several paragraphs
| of irrelevant code snippets and stack traces
|
| - up to date resources, since the official docs aren't very
| beginner friendly, third party resources end up being the way
| people learn (vimjoyer has been a godsend), but half the time
| when you try to use those resources, they're out of date and
| lead to broken nix configs, having solid official updated
| documentation to help new users get started in nix would go a
| long way here
| opengears wrote:
| Hyprland installation is a oneliner (if you are not on nvidia)
| programs.hyprland.enable = true; :D
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The default kernel package has been updated from 6.1 to 6.6.
| All supported kernels since 4.19 remain available.
|
| It is perhaps also worth pointing out that you can easily grab a
| _newer_ kernel as well; https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Linux_kernel
| discusses options.
|
| (Which I mostly mention because I skimmed the page, saw 6.6, made
| a confused face, went back to check that yes I do in fact have
| Linux 6.8 on my NixOS 23.11 system, then reread and realized they
| said _default_ which I didn 't really process the first time.)
| bsimpson wrote:
| I started using NixOS sort of randomly - I wanted a SteamOS-esque
| experience for my gaming handheld, and Jovian for NixOS seemed
| like one of the best options for that at the time.
|
| I like that it's about as close to the SteamOS experience that
| you can get in a third party distribution, and I like that
| everything is modular (so you could pick whatever desktop you
| want to pair it with).
|
| It's weird that _everything_ is configuration in Nix. Little
| stuff like changing your timezone seems to require a NixOS
| rebuild (which requires a keyboard). GUI settings clash with the
| Nix way of doing things.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Little stuff like changing your timezone seems to require a
| NixOS rebuild (which requires a keyboard).
|
| You mean setting the timezone (going and writing `time.timeZone
| = "whatever";`)? Because actually doing the rebuild (`nixos-
| rebuild switch`) would be easy enough to make a button for if
| you wanted (just make a .desktop file that runs the rebuild
| command).
| k8svet wrote:
| Do note you can _not_ set the timezone in config and set it at
| runtime. Useful if you move around a lot.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Thanks for the tip!
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Dunno if you're aware, but there's also Fedora's Atomic
| Desktop, which is actually more similar to Steam OS, as far as
| I can tell. Built on top is Universal Blue, which includes an
| actual Steam OS remix called "Bazzite".
|
| Conceptually, it is very different from NixOS, with image-based
| updates and all.
| bsimpson wrote:
| When I started down this path in November, there wasn't a
| clear choice between Bazzite and NixOS. Seems like a lot of
| people have chosen Bazzite, but since I have Nix working, I
| don't really have an incentive to change.
|
| Thanks for the advice though.
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