Hey all, thought this might be of interest to some here.
Wrote about why I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu after using it for several months on my daily driver. Suspect that this take is likely to be kind of controversial and court claims of skill issues, which might even be true.
Let me know what you think.
tldr:
- fucking with configs for hours regularly
- pip & venv doesn’t work on nixos
- DE broke when installed new DM
- not much community support
I didn’t realize pip and venv didn’t work… that’s a pretty big deal breaker for a lot of people, myself included.
I’m not a Nix user, but doesn’t Nix make both pip and venv obsolete in a way? Nix is a package manager (which could be used to package anything including Python packages/modules) and also allows you to create environments that include only certain packages of certain versions.
Sounds good in theory, until you want to install scikit-image or other Python libraries which need complex builds.
python3Packages.scikit-imageappears to be available and non-broken in nixpkgs; on my machine, I get/nix/store/w8681ncsw92cn4gq6gyraw4z19r0r6c3-python3.11-scikit-image-0.21.0. Do you have an actual example?I understand your point, but given nixpkgs’ position in the community, it might be a moot point.
pip and venv are working, but packages that require compiling or ship binaries by itself usually won’t work out of the box. They depend on gcc or libopenssl to be globally available: the whole gist of Nix not doing 😅
I’ve found devenv.sh to be most convenient way to handle such projects. You can define the dependencies for a project. It has explicit python/venv/requirements.txt/poetry support. It works for NixOS, but also other distros and MacOS. Very convenient to share and lock development tools and libraries across a team.
fucking with configs for hours regularly
this is the one reason i dont board the hype train for “customizable” distros: arch, nix, gentoo and so on unless im specifically looking to learn.
i use linux so i can install it and forget which distro im actually using.
I have been on arch professionally for ~5 years.
I am a GUI fan and I don’t like fucking around with the OS. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it at all.
So far it hardly required any maintenance (much less than Ubuntu, Windows or Mac, at least for my workflows).
And the only fucking around I did with it was the first two days setting everything up just the way I like.
To be fair, I already had extensive linux knowledge at the point of switching to arch - through ~4 years of constantly breaking my Debians and Ubuntus every couple of months.
i find arch to sometimes break on updates for me. it always turns out to be either:
1- bleeding edge package update made it bleed 2- needed to be watching announcements and change some config file 3- i havent updated in a while and it dislikes that.
i like having 100% automatic updates.
Depends on what yoy install I guess.
It only broke twice for me from updates during the 5 year period. 1. grub 2. openjdk
and the openjdk one simply didn’t update until I uninstalled the old one and reinstalled the new one.
it is for advanced users
Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source
How on earth?
I have actually done that once. Somehow managed to make install glibc over libc5 or something like that.
That was a while ago, though.
Debian really doesn’t like installing different versions of GUI libraries & their dependencies.
I really like Pantheon Files.
I know, I’ve once messed around to install a newer QT framework which was required by some package I’ve downloaded directly. Did you install them from the repos or manually copied the files into place? At first I thought the issues were due to compiling source code, not installing conflicting libraries.
I actually can’t remember as it would have been 6+ months ago now. The issue is probably fixed already by the Debian maintainers / Elementary Team / both.
Likely something with Meson build / apt not playing nicely.
I’ve been compiling apps depending on newer Qt and/or kdelibs versions for ages (back when the repository was literally called “kdelibs”, about 20 years ago).
This has never been an issue for me. Even with autoconf/automake, I just compiled everything to its own prefix, so it doesn’t interfere with the system at all. You don’t even need to fix the build system in the cases where it’s broken/lacks features, if you leverage all the “path” variables (CPATH, LIBRARY_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc.). But autotools, cmake, qmake, and every build system I’ve used so far supports this out of the box.
Not claiming it’s a skill issue, but I have to say I’m very surprised by reading any of this.
Specifically, for Debian, I was told 20 years ago by a very wise person “you never do
make installon Debian, specially not for the kernel”, and taught me how to use make-kpkg (or something like that, I don’t remember the name of the tool), which was a way to make a debian package of a self built kernel, which is obviously something that can’t be installed to its own prefix.
Pantheon Files is the best, i also compiled it from source when i was stuck on Pop!
I also don’t understand. For compiling from source, why not use podman or docker to just compile everything into a tarball that can be extracted into /opt? I used to do this all the time when installing multiple php versions on a CentOS machine.
I really don’t get it, I moved to NixOS some years ago. Okay, first few months I had to fiddle with configurations and add some packages that were missing. Everything past those early months was a blast.
Replacing a dead laptop? The most time consuming part (for me) is making a bootable USB. After that I can push my already ready made configuration and just back to where I was (backs ups are important).
Working on different versions of Python? No problem, a small nix script for each environment.
Working with different versions of GCC? Same as Python.
Everything just works. And if I fuck around I can revert the change. I can easily experiment in a way that will no fuck affect my ability to work.
At work we have Ubuntu, and I got the conclusion that nuking Canonical’s offices will be a blessing on humanity. They manage to deliver broken packages for years, even packages that work well on Debian.
While many of the issues with Debian can be resolved by compiling from source, this has been one of the main causes of system failure for me in the past. It also requires equal or greater effort than playing with Nixfiles.
I guess you are doing something wrong here. I can’t imagine that compiling stuff on Debian would be trickier than tinkering with NixOS.
Maybe you have been following advices on the web instead of taking the time to understand problems and keep your Debian tidy?
Besides, between an expert niche like NixOS and the popular Ubuntu, there are more than a dozen OSes you can consider when it comes to preferences on maintenance. You don’t have to consider so many, but a blog article on your particular three / four (NixOS, Debian Ubuntu + Mint) looks a bit off.
I’ve tried Arch and others as well, even stuff like Slackware, Bodhi, Void, but I’d say that my preference has generally moved away from doing tinkering / maintenance at all other than for fun or profit. I’d still consider Nix for a server / workstation setup but just not as a daily driver.
I may be a touch biased, but I feel like you might enjoy trying Gentoo one day, especially with the recent official binary package host.
I keep meaning to try Gentoo out but haven’t gotten round to it. I think it didn’t like VirtualBox or something?
Makes sense. NixOS isn’t for everybody and that’s fine.
For people like me who don’t change things on the regular, it’s fine. But using the latest and greatest or having to customise stuff is really a drag. Getting a new electron app on nixpkgs can take a long time because doing it yourself is pain. It’s easier to hope somebody else will deal with that pain.
Have fun on Ubuntu.
I run nix unstable, so I get all the latest software. It’s actually been very stable for me, and I love knowing I can rollback at any time if something happens to break.
By latest and greatest I meant stuff not packaged in nixpkgs yet.
I know it’s not for everyone, but creating your own nix derivation for software that doesn’t exist yet on nixpikgs is not terribly difficult (for most things).
It varies wildly, in my experience. A binary package in nix? For sure, easy. Any programming language with its own ecosystem: good luck. Python, JS, and anything electron is hilariously difficult to package when anything goes wrong. If it doesn’t work at the 5th try, gotta get ready for a long night.
Even C/C++ projects that should “just work” with
mkDerivationare far from trivial, but that’s also due to how shit the ecosystems of those languages are. “have A,B,C installed on ubuntu 18.04” and then you find out that there are actually a bunch more dependencies, or gcc is too recent, or you have to mess with theLD_LIBRARY_PATH, or or or or.There have been very, very few packages that I found trivial to package. nix is very good at exposing hidden dependencies.
Yes and no. It depends on what your aim is. I LOVE Nix and it runs like a beast on my ZBook. But I’m after reproducible environments I can just blast around on all over the place without a heavy imagining solution. Works great for that.
Does it take some time to setup as a daily driver? Yes. But no more than Arch. But the thing with Nix is if you already have a robust config, it takes less time than Arch to go from zero to stomping out code.
Ubuntu is a great generic distro. But I find Nix gives me oomph. As with everything in this ecosphere…use what works for YOU! 😁
I like reading about OS journeys like these. Personally I ended up living with immutable fedora despite of its endless challenges, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to mutable linux for my dev laptop. I feel immutability is a shield against change over time.
Someone recently recommended PopOs to me. Any thoughts on that?
Great beginner distro for sure. On par with Mint with “it just works”.
They’re between releases right now, but once COSMIC desktop is ready and they release Pop 24.04 I’ll probably try it out. More likely that I’m moving to Xubuntu Minimal 24.04 on the daily driver though.
PopOS is great OOTB but I’ve become attached to rofi and XFCE recently and like the old-school “apps are utilities” style of Linux desktops over PopOS / Mint which try to bundle everything together.
Xubuntu Minimal 24.04
Why not just do Mint XFCE then? At least that way there’s no snap to deal with.
It’s honestly one of my favorite distros and has a lot of unique awesome features and guides for beginners.
Discord has some rough edges if you use it regularly but it definitely still works.
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NixOS is a reproducible OS. I wouldn’t call it immutable.
It’s not really fully reproducible either.
Isn’t it fully reproducible with flakes?
Nope, nix doesn’t ensure or require that the builds are deterministic. It’s not any better in that regard than other package managers.
nix doesn’t ensure or require that the builds are deterministic
Pin package version and --pure?
That should already allow it to be ahead of other PMs.
A package is reproducible if you use the same inputs, run the build, and get the same outputs.
The issue is that the build can produce different outputs given the same inputs. So you need to modify the build or patch the outputs. This is something that is being worked on by most distributions: https://reproducible-builds.org/who/projects/
NixOS is not special in that regard nor are all NixOS packages reproducible.
Nixos is immutable to force system configuration through the declarative nix configs/build system not to limit tinkering.
More serious than this is the rare occasions Nix packages conflict with each other. While Nix separates dependencies, it doesn’t separate them as absolutely as a full container system like Docker. Therefore it is possible, albeit unlikely, to end up with conflicts between versions of installed libraries.
Never tried it but thanks for dispelling the hype. What a meme OS.
