Am I out of touch?

No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.

  • ikidd@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I went through a NixOS phase, and for a user that isn’t trying to maintain a dev environment, it’s a bloody lot of hassle.

    I’m all behind immutable distros even though I don’t particularly have the need for them, but declaritive OSs are kinda niche.

    • demesisx@infosec.pubOP
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      3 months ago

      for a user that isn’t trying to maintain a dev environment, it’s a bloody lot of hassle

      I agree but I prefer it to things like ansible for sure. I’m also happy to never have to run 400 apt install commands in a specific order lest I have to start again from scratch on a new system.

      Another place I swear by it is in the declaration of drives. I used to have to use a bash script on boot that would update fstab every time I booted (I mount an NFS volume in my LAN as if it were native to my machine) then unmount it on shutdown. With nix, I haven’t had to invent solutions for that weird quirk (and any other quirks) since day one because I simply declared it like so:

      {
        config,
        lib,
        pkgs,
        inputs,
        ...
      }: {
        fileSystems."/boot" = {
          device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/bort";
          fsType = "vfat";
        };
      
        fileSystems."/" = {
          device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/lisa";
          fsType = "ext4";
        };
      
        swapDevices = [
          {device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/homer";}
        ];
      
        fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/video" = {
          device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/video";
          options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"];
          fsType = "nfs";
        };
      
        fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/Programming" = {
          device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/Programming";
          options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"];
          fsType = "nfs";
        };
      
        fileSystems."/home/mrskinner/music" = {
          device = "192.168.8.130:/volume/music";
          options = ["x-systemd.automount" "noauto"];
          fsType = "nfs";
        };
      }
      

      IMO, where they really shine is in the context of declarative dev environments where the dependencies can be locked in place FOREVER if needed. I even use Nix to build OCI/Docker containers with their definitions declared right inside of my dev flake for situations where I have to work with people who hate the Nix way.