NixOS Linux

by MarcScott • 11 years ago

231 95 11 years ago

bluejekyll• 11 years ago

I'm really intrigued by NixOS, but I have to wonder if it's too much too fast, and the Atomic project isn't a better stepping stone.

r0naa• 11 years ago

I have been thinking about switching to NixOS because of the great things I keep hearing about it. I would enjoy reading reviews from HNers, has anyone used it as a desktop?

tormeh5• 11 years ago

Didn't even install for me. It's for tinkerers currently, I think. I basically wanted an Ubuntu that didn't deteriorate with time, so I guess I'm not the target audience.

sergiosgc2• 11 years ago

Looking for an ubuntu that didn't deteriorate, I switched to debian sid two years ago. Sid is a rolling distribution, so there are no releases. It's not that it does not deteriorate. Instead, it deteriorates at a rate that allows me to fix things as they break.

Mind you, I used Gentoo for many years before ubuntu, so I'm used to rolling breakage. Sid is a lot more stable than Gentoo (circa 2010)

xiaomai• 11 years ago

Nix is awesome. The last time I ran it stuff like gnome-shell wasn't packaged, which made it hard to use for a desktop (they did have a number of window managers packaged though).

That's the hardest part about nix right now (the lack of packaged software). It is pretty easy to write your own packages for basic software though (and the Nix project is good about taking pull requests).

Looks like gnome3 is packaged now, I'll have to give it another shot: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/s...

yellowapple• 11 years ago

I ran a NixOS desktop VM for a little while to familiarize myself with it and eventually be able to tackle learning the server side of things. It's very different from a normal GNU/Linux, that's for sure.

ebzzry3• 11 years ago

We're using it for servers, laptops, and desktops. I'm using NixOS now on bare metal to compose this message. The system is built like a rock. And oh, managing just a single text file to configure everything is a big plus.

I highly recommend it. :-)

corobo• 11 years ago

just a single text file to configure everything is a big plus

What ever happened to Linux folks mocking Windows' registry from back in the day :)

davidrusu2• 11 years ago

NixOS is really nice, what I enjoy most about it is it gives you the tools to be explicit about the state of your system.

We know that implicit state and mutation are terrible in the programming world why not extend that philosophy to your entire OS?

You might be missing some packages so make sure to check this:

http://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html

before installing.

It's still early for NixOS, the OS is solid but it's likely you'll need to package up a program or two (but it's not difficult)

imsofuture• 11 years ago

Yep, I echo this experience. It is my main desktop OS, I am very happy with it. Myself + another developer at my company both use it, and it's starting to gain interest from others, seeing as it's mostly a panacea to all sorts of environment and configuration issues.

I was pretty unhappy learning how to write the strange config language at first, but I've made my peace with it. You will almost certainly need to write a package or two, but there's a lot of active development to learn from, and lots of example to cargo cult.

chriswarbo3• 11 years ago

I've been using it for nearly a year. One comment I'd make is that learning the nix package language will make life much easier.

I've written a few thoughts about nix at http://chriswarbo.net/essays/nixos/

gosub• 11 years ago

I've tried to install NixOS on an old laptop, for a minimal installation, there were some things I did non like:

* Default packages are compiled with all the dependencies

* The configuration language is a functional programming language, and that's a plus, but the syntax is quiet weird, not similar to ML, Haskell nor Lisp.

* some command line tools are cryptic at best, for example searching for available packages is done with nix-env -qa \* -P | fgrep -i "$1"

josteink• 11 years ago

Getting it running on actual iron took more effort than I expected, but lately distros like Ubuntu has spoiled the linux-crowd.

The hardest part about going all in is of you find some of the software you rely on not being packaged. There's just no way to "cheat" and ./configure && make'ing for way around: you have to learn the Nix language and package the software yourself. (Which can arguably be said to be a viral feature for getting more software packaged)

To me this was too much work to fit in an otherwise busy weekend and I just had to give up. Had I had more time to do things properly, I would probably have stuck with it.

The concepts it introduces are quite nice and well executed.

tormeh5• 11 years ago

At the start of this year, I tried to install various Linux distros on my laptop using a USB drive. Only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE worked. Why is this? Is the desktop really that irrelevant? This is not a bug report. I'm wondering what the institutional reasons are.

robertfw• 11 years ago

This isn't really the best place for the question, and besides that you'd need to provide a hell of a lot more information for anyone to help you.

keypusher• 11 years ago

First, it's really not the case that only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE work on the desktop. You may have run into issues which YOU were unable to solve, but those issues may also have been specific to your laptop hardware configuration. It is well known that certain laptops tend to work better with Linux than others, in fact Im running Fedora on a Lenovo right now and it works great. So, is the desktop really irrelevant? Depends, different distros have different priorities. To date, Linux on the desktop has not shown mainstream appeal, but it does seem to gain more and more users every year. If you really insist on being obtuse regarding the reasons for poor Linux desktop support, the primary answer is that Linux has a long history of being a very good server OS. Security, stability, speed, price and customization are all reasons that is true. There is limited time in the day, and so one thing must be prioritized over another. Most linux distros choose to prioritize server development over the desktop experience, because that is where their primary user base is. Other teams made different choices. Why, at the start of this year, I tried to install various Windows versions on my rack server using a USB drive. Only Windows Server 2012 worked. Why is this? Is the server really that irrelevant to Microsoft? This is not a bug report though, I'm just wondering what the institutional reasons are.

tormeh5• 11 years ago

Yeah, that makes sense. I was just under the impression that most of the hardware-facing software (kernel, drivers etc) were the same across distros and therefore keeping up with Ubuntu would almost be a given.

I was about to express my shock that Windows server had immediately obvious bugs, but then I sensed the irony. I would guess that Windows server on any given x86 server works a lot better than nixOS on my laptop. So not sure if I get your point there.

sp3322• 11 years ago

Distros have to choose which kernel version they want. This can be a tradeoff for stability or new features etc. If they pick an older kernel, the decide which newer drivers they want to try to backport. Then they decide which drivers they feel like supporting and putting in the repositories, and which of those get loaded onto the installation media. Some distros might have closer relationships with specific vendors and have information about configuration details or workarounds. Laptops are notorious for using nonstandard hardware from niche suppliers and taking a lot of work to configure.

tormeh5• 11 years ago

Thanks

shared4you• 11 years ago

NixOS has been discussed many times on HN already. However, Nix 1.9 was released today (/yesterday for the some):

Release Notes: https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.9/manual/#ssec-relnotes...

Downloads: https://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.9

chriswarbo3• 11 years ago

nix-shell can now be used as a #!-interpreter. This allows you to write scripts that dynamically fetch their own dependencies. For example, here is a Haskell script that, when invoked, first downloads GHC and the Haskell packages on which it depends:

Wow, that sounds super useful! I'm finding more and more default.nix and shell.nix files scattered through my hard drive, along with wrapper scripts for invoking nix-shells.

I can probably replace a lot of these with appropriate shebangs :)

mateuszf• 11 years ago

This is a great idea. It would be cool if Docker supported something like this.

marcosdumay3• 11 years ago

Has anybody here got the experience of running NixOS in production or on the desktop (as the main OS, not in a never booted partition)?

cwp5• 11 years ago

Yeah, I've been running NixOS on production servers for about a year. I'm at a small startup, so it's not huge scale (yet!) but it works great.

marcosdumay3• 11 years ago

Got any problems with package availability?

I imagine those should be very easy to fix, is that true at daily use?

Nullabillity• 11 years ago

I've been using it on my HTPC for a while. Getting it to work for a relatively exotic setup (boot into Kodi, still allow admin logins, mount NFS media shares on boot) was a bit fiddly, but once it worked it's been great. The one concern I have is that it was pretty happy to recompile Chromium all the time, but switching to Firefox made it more bearable.

vdijkbas• 11 years ago

At LumiGuide we use NixOS on our development machines as well as on all our production servers. I used ansible before but NixOS is on a whole different level.

See the following for a story about a system we just deployed which uses NixOS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690683

millstone5• 11 years ago

I'm intrigued by the "atomic upgrades and rollbacks" claim. Let's say that deploying a package requires placing two files somewhere, e.g. vmlinuz and initrd. How can this be done atomically?

sp3322• 11 years ago

The package manager could just flock() a specific file before making any changes.

millstone5• 11 years ago

From svn's red book:

By atomic transaction, we mean simply this: either all of the changes happen in the repository, or none of them happens. Subversion tries to retain this atomicity in the face of program crashes, system crashes, network problems, and other users' actions.

Does Nix mean the same thing? Is it atomic in the face of program or system crashes?

cwp5• 11 years ago

The contents of any package are immutable; once they're written they're never modified again. New versions of the package get installed in a different directory tree.

tomaac• 11 years ago

I am not sure if this is the same, but Redhat's Project Atomic does similar thing using rpm-ostree

http://www.projectatomic.io/

Lethalman4• 11 years ago

It's a different approach. That's basically an implementation using ostree. Nix is way different than that. Neither is better in my opinion, but I use Nix happily.

jfoutz2• 11 years ago

The handwavy answer is, each install (even later versions of the same package) gets installed into a unique directory. There is no /bin or /usr/bin.

bit more info here: https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

millstone5• 11 years ago

Literally, there is no /bin or /usr/bin? So most shebang scripts won't run at all? That is indeed a radical departure.

mbrock• 11 years ago

They use atomic file operations involving symlinks. Moving a new symlink to overwrite an old symlink is one way to atomically switch out a directory for another. I don't know if there is any special handling of the kernel packages, but that's basically how it works as far as I know.

_RPM2• 11 years ago

Is this proprietary? I can't find a link to the source anywhere.

ebzzry3• 11 years ago

https://github.com/NixOS

_RPM2• 11 years ago

That doesn't have the source code to the operation system on here. So, agin, I ask, is this damn thing GPL'd or is it on some prop. bullshit?

iamcurious• 11 years ago

I have been using it for a while as my main OS. So far it has been great. There are a few warts, like any distro, but with NixOS the fixes tends to get written in the main configuration file, instead of scattered among many files. That meant a lot when I had to install it in another machine. 1) Install NixOS with my configuration file. 2) Copy dot files to home 3) There is no step 3) !

dmix• 11 years ago

How have you found package support? The quality/breadth of packages available in ArchLinux AUR would stop me from using any other distro.

Arch's primary package set contains the standard set - which I assume is similar to NixOS - but all of packages requiring tricky/custom configuration tend to be in AUR. Which has saved me on a number of occasions from having to follow pages of tutorials that you'd normally have to follow in order to install things when using Linux for a desktop.

For example, setting up nice fonts with great default settings in Arch is a single AUR package away.

asddubs• 11 years ago

Arch is great. The only reason I switched away from it were the occasional manual intervention updates which could just mess up your system if you weren't paying attention.

nextos2• 11 years ago

I currently use Arch, but would like to switch to Nix.

A main practical issue is that Nix packages are often built with all possible options vs Arch minimal packaging philosophy. In practice you install something as innocent as mutt, and python comes as a dependency!

labianchin• 11 years ago

Cool! Can you share your NixOS configuration file?

krick• 11 years ago

Many people pointed out that NixOS has been discussed here many times already, but nobody mentioned Guix, so here it is, for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127679

davexunit4• 11 years ago

See also GNU Guix and the associated distro GuixSD, which is based on the same underpinnings of NixOS: https://gnu.org/s/guix

technomancy2• 11 years ago

I'm much more interested in guix since it has all the same upsides but uses scheme instead of a weird NIH language, and it also has some standards when it comes to the licenses of the packages. (Nix disappointingly gives you the Adobe Flash plugin when you ask it to install Firefox, etc.) Still grateful for the solid foundation Nix provides.

davexunit4• 11 years ago

Come join us for a hack sometime. It would be cool to get some of your elisp projects packaged.

chriswarbo3• 11 years ago

it has all the same upsides but uses scheme instead of a weird NIH language

The packaging language is great, but I agree that it would make more sense to embed it in an existing language like Scheme.

Is guix compatible with nixpkgs, or do all package definitions need to be translated into scheme first?

Nix disappointingly gives you the Adobe Flash plugin when you ask it to install Firefox, etc.

Really? I've had Nix refuse to install stuff, telling me to override the "allowUnfree" option if I want it to work (this happens when a Haskell project doesn't specify a license in its cabal file, for example).

I use NixOS, so maybe the defaults are different from standalone Nix.

nickpsecurity2• 11 years ago

I just commented on one IT segment not learning from the past. NixOS deserves praise for doing the opposite: seeing various problem involved, identifying proven ways for solving them, and implementing them into a usable solution. Combining declarative and transactional properties into the package system as effectively as they do is very smart. I hope to see more distro's follow suit.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly. However, I sincerely doubt most distros will adopt it, for the simple reason that unifying the packaging infrastructure means more-or-less obsoleting the concept of a distribution.

nickpsecurity2• 11 years ago

Would it, though? Wouldn't a distribution just become a specific configuration of source, binaries, and other data?

regularfry• 11 years ago

A "distribution", at its core, is simply a (nominally curated) collection of software which works well together. The packaging system is, or should be, a red herring.

nodivbyzero• 11 years ago

Is it better than ArchLinux?

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

Similar effort in debian : https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

(one of the project lead, https://people.debian.org/~lunar/blog/, is a haskeller, so no surprises)

Read his blog, very interesting to see how tiny things matter.

thoughtpolice• 11 years ago

It's worth clarifying this a bit because there are a lot of subtle implications about what it means to be 'reproducible' or 'deterministic'.

To make the terminology clearer, I like to use the term 'deterministic' vs 'reproducible'. A deterministic build is one which, if it works, will always work, and follow the same steps. A reproducible build is one that you can reproduce identically, down to each individual SHA1-hash. This is what Debian has spearheaded, and what they mean by 'reproducible build'.

At the moment, Nix packages are deterministic - but they are not reproducible.

If I have a specific git revision of nixpkgs (the repository containing all package descriptions), and I say 'install mutt', I'm guaranteed that I will always get the same build results. No matter when/where I do it. That means I'm always going to get mutt version x.y, with dependencies A, B, and C, all with their own exact versions, and features enabled. The same optimization levels. The steps the compiler uses to build everything will be the same, etc.

You can essentially think of a 'nix expression' as a program that gets compiled to a shell script, which does a build, and you run the shell script. So if you have git revision DEADBEEF of the 'nixpkgs' set, and you 'run the compiler', so to speak, to generate a 'builder' from a Nix expression - it seems very obvious it will do the exact same thing, every time, regardless if you run it today or next week.

The thing is, this is a pretty nice property. In Debian for example, if I 'apt-get install' something, I may not get the same program if I do it today and then do it tomorrow, because it may get updated. This, in practice, is kind of a big deal actually. It means it's impossible (unless you use your own mirror) to actually have things like prod/development environments the exact same without imaging them like Docker. And of course, this makes rollbacks impossible because the set of packages on your system is really a bunch of mutable variables.

For example I used to do security research, and it was a massive pain in the ass when I would try to 'apt-get install' mysql and get a patched version already. I needed to write code to find this vulnerability, AND I want to regression test that code in the future. But I can't. It makes it very hard to do things like write automation to make sure you can detect if mysql is vulnerable (because where will you get the pristine package you originally tested with?)

Similarly, because of this property, you can be sure a developer's computer is exactly the same as a production or staging environment for example. Because the 'state' of your whole computer is really a function of two arguments - a function of your configuration.nix and your nixpkgs package set. This is what it means to be a 'purely functional' distribution!

But the builds aren't reproducible yet. There's all kinds of actual 'non-determinism' in the build process for any one specific project that makes bit-for-bit reproductions difficult. For example people use `__DATE__`, or they do weird things like rely on build mtimes, or other crazy stuff. Debian has tracked tons of these down - so it's doable!

There is a branch of Nixpkgs that aims to fix this. Hopefully it will be solved for NixOS 15.10.

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

So reproducible is mostly bitstream equality ? One thing I liked in the debian effort, is, IIRC, they tried to define some form of equivalence classes to express binaries with or without debug symbols, etc etc.

thrownaway1223• 11 years ago

Does this not lose the major advantage of a traditional package manager? Namely that I update openssh in one location and all my packages are now secure. Rather than having to update every package that depends upon openshh separately?

ambrop7• 11 years ago

Generally, all packages depending on that library will need to be rebuilt. But that is automatic when you do an update, it just may take time (either for packages to be rebuild locally, or by the build farm if you're using channels). But you can manually do a hack to substitute a patched version when you want the fix right now: https://nixos.org/wiki/Security_Updates

lobster_johnson• 11 years ago

NixOS would be awesome on the server, but I'm worried about security updates. Debian/Ubuntu have a lot of resources and protocols set up for this; for users like me, I can follow the mailing list where every package updated with security fixes is announced, and the updates seem to meticulously follow announcements about known vulnerabilities. How is NixOS in that regard?

Profpatsch• 11 years ago

I have been writing a guide on how to set up a desktop system with NixOS, but I’m not quite finished yet.

I wonder how high the interest in something like that would be? I can throw up an unfinished beta version of it if people are interested.

NixOS Linux

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