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long-term Nix and NixOS users, why do you still use Nix/NixOS? Has your interest about it diminish? (lemmy.my.id)

submitted 11 months ago by ins@lemmy.my.id to c/nixos@lemmy.ml

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I've been using Nix and NixOS for 4 years now. While I like using it for my PCs and tried using it for servers with success, I think its ecosystem still is immature for development and production purposes, and thus my passion for Nix has faded.

So my question is what keeps you using Nix or NixOS? How have you been using it? Do you still feel passion and hype for it?

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[–] colin@lemmy.uninsane.org 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

what keeps you using Nix or NixOS?

a sort of one-man network effect?

i wanted to load books onto my e-reader (runs NixOS) wirelessly: i already have a media server which i use for TV (Jellyfin). the e-reader speaks NFS, so i enabled NFS on my media server, added the auth to the e-reader's Nix config, and since all my NixOS devices use the same repo for their config, my laptop and PC both get that NFS setup "for free". incrementally, that makes everything else easier: i have a MAME arcade cabinet in the other room running Arch. if it had been running NixOS instead, suddenly that task of "load books onto my e-reader wirelessly" would have also solved the issue of "load games onto my MAME cabinet wirelessly".

once you get going it's just so easy to keep building incrementally. "tech debt" is a bit less of a thing than with other distros (still a thing, just smaller) because of determinism and nix flake check and so on. honestly once i care enough about not being able to load games onto that MAME cabinet easily, i'll solve that by flashing it with Nix, and so grows my network effect.

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Nix for 8 years and can't imagine using anything else. Especially on severs it is in a completely different league than the next best thing (which I guess is a myriad of docker containers?) I've also been using it on desktop for nearly that long and it is also pretty great. It maybe isn't quite as polished as some other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu but I haven't had a major issue. Plus being able to set up a new system and being 95% of the way to my full customized experience is incredibly. Especially nice because I have a desktop and laptop so keeping their configs in sync is great.

For development I have found it is pretty nice. I mostly use nix-shell to make dependencies available. There is the occasional thing that doesn't work because they want to download prebuilt binaries over the internet, but honestly I mostly consider that a feature that these don't work by default. Plus if you need to get these working you can just use steam-run and it works correctly 99% of the time.

[–] Unmapped@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have only been on nixos a few weeks. Absolutely loving it. I keep seeing people talking about this needing to use steam-run for binaries. I don't understand what this means at all tbh. I'm a newbie web Dev so everything I've made so far has just been running in Firefox and node. Will I ever have to worry about this? Or is this just a issue for making software outside of the browser?

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You don't need it often. Just if you are running pre-built binaries. There are other ways to work around it but steam-run is a big hammer that basically sets up an environment that looks like a "regular" distro with a bunch of command libraries available for running that command.

One example I had in web-dev was Prisma which wants to download some pre-built binaries when installed via npm. These are available in nixpkgs (and I am now using these) but the first way to get it working was just to run it via steam-run.

[–] Unmapped@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. I think I understand. Would using distrobox with Arch or Ubuntu be another way to make a environment that would work?

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago

I don't know much about distrobox but probably. It seems like distrobox would be a bit more isolated from the host system. (Which can be both a prod or a con depending on your use case.) steam-run will also reuse the host libraries rather than downloading a new copy so it will be more efficient.

[–] eneff@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago

I've only been using it for about a year, but as of now I can't imagine ever going back to imperative system configuration. Having my infrastructure declared in its entirety by a version controlled code base is just too comfy.