NixOS 24.05 "Uakari" Released

https://nixos.org/blog/announcements/2024/nixos-2405/

by opengears • 2 years ago

58 40 2 years ago

_lvbh4• 2 years ago

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.

ninetyninenine4• 2 years ago

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.

_lvbh4• 2 years ago

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

bsimpson5• 2 years ago

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.

k8svet2• 2 years ago

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.

rav3ndust2• 2 years ago

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/

_lvbh4• 2 years ago

Documentation!

qw3rty01• 2 years ago

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

hammyhavoc3• 2 years ago

ChatGPT generates some complete dogshit in terms of Nix configs.

Rather than waste time and valuable electricity and water on LLM prompts with poor results, just read the docs and learn. It'll be faster—I promise.

opengears• 2 years ago

Hyprland installation is a oneliner (if you are not on nvidia) programs.hyprland.enable = true; :D

_lvbh4• 2 years ago

I actually don’t like the special treatment of certain programs. Consistency is king. Even on Fedora, I boot into TTY and run Hyprland manually from there or just stay in TTY+tmux.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

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.)

bsimpson5• 2 years ago

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-h2• 2 years ago

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).

k8svet2• 2 years ago

Do note you can not set the timezone in config and set it at runtime. Useful if you move around a lot.

bsimpson5• 2 years ago

Thanks for the tip!

fuzzy2• 2 years ago

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.

bsimpson5• 2 years ago

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.

hammyhavoc3• 2 years ago

You can have a declarative env with imperative dotfiles with NixOS—no problem.

lostmsu2• 2 years ago

God damn it, I just installed the previous version in a VM as my first experiment.

justinsaccount• 2 years ago

Well, now you can upgrade it and see how that works :-)

pxc3• 2 years ago

How'd your upgrade go? Upgrades between NixOS versions are smoother than you were likely expecting.

lostmsu2• 2 years ago

Well, the system still boots and I still can login :D

arvigeus• 2 years ago

What I love about NixOS is the ability to configure my entire system in one place. What I hate is the Nix language itself - you’ll get used to it, but only because you have no other real choice.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

Yeah, it feels like writing bash in Haskell. I don't know if it's a reflection of the core problem domain though - it feels like it might be.

ncrmro• 2 years ago

Just started getting into nixos. Zfs on luks with tpm unlock is easy peezy

NixOS 24.05 "Uakari" Released

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