Mobile NixOS: The Present and the Future

https://samuel.dionne-riel.com/blog/2019/08/21/mobile-nixos-the-present-and-future.html

by buovjaga • 7 years ago

97 47 7 years ago

k__2• 7 years ago

Nice!

I think Nix and NixOS is the best thing that happened to the Linux ecosystem in the last ten years. Good that it spreads to mobile.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

It's older than 10 years, but yes, NixOS is one of the best things that's happened. Another awesome thing that happened at around the same time is Archlinux. Both the distro and its Wiki are great.

nextos• 7 years ago

They are my 2 favorite distros, as I think they fill in 2 obvious local maxima in the design space: i) an imperative system with binary packages that tracks upstream as closely as possible (Arch) and ii) a functional/declarative distro (Nix).

lame-robot-hoax• 7 years ago

I'd like to try it but to be honest I'm a bit too lazy to go through with the current install process. If they were to adopt the calamares installer though, or develop their own graphical install, I'd love to give it a try. Same with Void.

adamtulinius• 7 years ago

In my opinion that would only be useful to help with creating partitions and file systems. The rest of the install process is basically creating your system configuration (and there's a helper tool for that), and a single command to perform the install.

What do you think a graphical installer should do for the user?

Filligree3• 7 years ago

While it would be possible to do that... to be quite honest, if the current install process is enough to drive you away then you'd have a horrible time using it.

NixOS is definitely the perfect OS for fiddlers. Practically nothing is usable without at least some minor tweaks, but once you've tweaked it you won't later lose those tweaks. For anyone who stopped enjoying that after redoing the same config for the fifth time, it's great.

jolmg2• 7 years ago

I can't remember what the install process of NixOS is like, but I just wanted to say that I absolutely love Archlinux's installation process. The live-cd just drops you in a command line with an ~/install.txt file explaining the steps you have to do to install the distro. It quickly educates you what a distro installation consists of, instead of just hiding everything behind a wizard. If I ever want to change anything I set during installation, I don't need to re-install like I would have thought before, I just need to redo whatever step involves the thing I want to change. It also quickly enables you to do a greater breadth of configurations by being exposed to the tools that perform the various steps and their configurations. That's instead of being limited to the options presented in a wizard.

ingenieroariel• 7 years ago

Are you thinking regular NixOS with kde or more like notOS + sway?

eterps• 7 years ago

What's 'notOS'?

Ericson23143• 7 years ago

https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

Ericson23143• 7 years ago

I think regular NixOS.

Fnoord• 7 years ago

I would love to have deduplication on OS on mobile; it is a horror to go back to previous state.

Do you plan on allowing other projects such as AOSP forks, UT, Sailfish, postmarketOS to work on top if Mobile NixOS? So a project like Mer was?

[Edit: To answer my own question: GitHub page says its heavily based on postmarketOS]

ImNotTheNSA• 7 years ago

Any device not allowing that is, simply put, not respecting the intelligence of the user.

This is kind of a silly absolutist opinion. Sure, you should have an option to have a completely open mobile OS... but to say that any OS with other priorities than complete “openness” is disrespectful is to throw literally every other consideration to the wind. I mean... really, what about security?

Ideologues tend to forget about reality, sometimes, it seems. Verified app stores, for example, are about providing security to the end user, not about disrespecting the end user.

I can’t help but feel like ideologically driven projects like often almost immediately discredit themselves with crap like this. Their software comes off as about making some statement, not providing something great, novel, and beneficial to people.

tathougies2• 7 years ago

Um.... he's not saying OSes with other priorities are disrespectful. He's saying that devices that are designed to make it difficult for their owners to install their own software on it (sometimes going so far as to attempt to make it illegal) are being disrespectful to their purchasers.

Tehchops2• 7 years ago

How do you reconcile that when it's very likely allowing even a small population of "owners" to install unverified software ends up directly harming the majority of the other "owners".

t0astbread• 7 years ago

In the end both kinds of systems are necessary: Locked-down with trust managed by an authority for less tech-savvy users (or users who do not want to manage their own security and are okay with the drawbacks) and open systems with the responsibilities put into the user's hands.

naasking• 7 years ago

Verified app stores, for example, are about providing security to the end user, not about disrespecting the end user.

They quite literally cannot do that. It's security theatre.

gonvaled• 7 years ago

Verified app stores, for example, are about providing security to the end user, not about disrespecting the end user.

Everything a company does is for the bottom line.

App stores are there for lock-in, and for taking a percent of the sale.

The security features are a (fortunate) side effect: the company uses it as selling point.

c-smile2• 7 years ago

Interesting.

I am thinking of making Sciter Engine as a chrome for mobile devices. So mobile UI can be defined in terms of HTML/CSS with code-behind-UI written in C/C++ or script.

Conceptually that would be close to FirefoxOS but more inclined into native side. Or at least will have more flexibility in this respect.

Is it interesting at all?

ptrott20172• 7 years ago

Definitely of interest. Also of interest would be using Sciter for embedded (but not mobile) apps. Its a natural fit for certain markets.

Are you still considering open sourcing Sciter? I personally hope so - but also know how much is involved in going down that path.

c-smile2• 7 years ago

"would be using Sciter for embedded apps" that is not a problem already. E.g. it runs on ARMs like Raspberry Pi. SDK contains binaries that use GTK but it is possible to run it without any window manager. Access to FB or video memory is enough.

As of OpenSource, yes I have plans for that. The only problem is that OS is a great responsibility, at least for me. It is going to be a significant effort to document source code, etc. I am actively looking for sponsors for the effort.

anilgulecha• 7 years ago

Yes!

How can I reach out to you?

fsiefken• 7 years ago

It would be nice if I could use NixOS through Termux on Android.

manveru• 7 years ago

There is https://github.com/t184256/nix-in-termux

Ericson23143• 7 years ago

Very excited to use this and buy a librem 5 for it.

kstenerud4• 7 years ago

I'm just waiting for them to solve the problem of the package manager taking multiple gigabytes of memory to run. My last experience with it involved a lot of "unable to fork: Cannot allocate memory". It's insane that a package manager would even exceed even 100mb of memory usage, let alone run into multiple gigabytes. No way there's that much information to manage.

Filligree3• 7 years ago

That's because it isn't a package manager, it's an interpreted programming language. The package management requires running a huge program in that language.

Of course knowing why it happens didn't make it less frustrating, but it's hard to fix. What you can do is build your system remotely, on a more capable machine, perhaps with nixos-rebuild --target-host.

(That's a shell script, and fairly readable.)

kstenerud4• 7 years ago

To me this sounds absolutely insane. Package managers that work in a couple of megabytes of ram is a solved problem. How can this be unsolvable?

taktoa• 7 years ago

That's actually just a command line infelicity; the advice to use `nix-env -i foobar` is really misguided, and you can avoid excessive memory usage by doing `nix-env -iA nixos.foobar` (or `nixpkgs.foobar` if you are using it on a non-NixOS machine). The difference is that in the former case, `foobar` is a regular expression that is being matched against the `name` field of every package in nixpkgs, whereas in the latter case, `foobar` is an attribute path that is used to traverse the nested Nix objects that make up nixpkgs. Since Nix is lazy, the former results in evaluating a LOT of stuff, whereas the latter does not.

kstenerud4• 7 years ago

Even if it were evaluating the entire library of Congress, there's no valid reason for it to consume gigabytes of memory. I really can't understand why this is so...

Mobile NixOS: The Present and the Future

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