That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Yeah there's a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.
In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a "fresh install" on every reboot.
edit: I do feel norawibb's point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.
🎉 Same! I've been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.
Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS's, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.
For reproducible configuration in the Arch world, there's a project which always looks good to me: aconfmgr
https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr
I think Arch+aconfmgr+yadm+btrfs == a pretty solid arrangement.
Though I'm of course itching for first class Bcachefs support...
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
Can you give an example in what kind of scenario you would want "identical servers"? In my head that is where tools like ansible come into play..?
You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.
Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.
The great thing about Nix is that it achieves reproducibility with the package manager. Container and Ansible depend on taking a system and documenting steps to bring it to the desired state. This state then might deviate over time (e.g. crashing while updating).
But yes, for most practical use it probably doesn't make much of a difference. For me Nix forces me to document what I'm doing, which I might not do for "quick and simple change" on other systems.
My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I'm forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.
That's right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)
It's definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)
Cool that you mention also the other contender OS in that regard. Interestingly you both chose Void as your comparison...I would be curious to why? @7ai@sh.itjust.works
I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it's new and an independent distro. I'll try the other two some day.
I sense a dislike for systemd. :D Actually didn't know alpine is gentoo based. Thanks for your insight.
It is not. Alpine is independant and uses a ports-like packaging system.
ports as in BSD?
Yes.
I was just going off based on its history. It began based on gentoo. (Wikipedia) but yea it is independent now.
In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.
Also this in your configure.nix:
nix.registry = {
nixpkgs = {
from = {
type = "indirect";
id = "nixpkgs";
};
to = {
type = "path";
path = inputs.nixpkgs.outPath;
};
};
};
This will create an entry in the nix registry pointing to your currently installed version and stop nix search from constantly updating the package list.
Are there any tradeoffs I need to accept to use this?
No, it just makes the nix command use the same nixpkgs repository your system is already using. Without it nix will constantly redownload the latest nixpkgs-unstable which is very slow. You will get slightly older software when you do something like nix run nixpkgs#blender ("old" here meaning the same version as if you had it installed on your current system), but if you just want to try something out, you probably care more about it being fast than the latest version.
And if you care about lastest stuff you'll can just make yourself a nixpkgs-unstable registry entry with:
nix registry add flake:unstable github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable
and than do:
nix run nixpkgs-unstable#blender
Updating your OS isn't impacted by any of this at all, as that happens via the /etc/nixos/flake.lock file as before.
PS: This assumes you are using flakes and the new nix command, both of which are still marked as experiment and not enabled the default.
Thanks a lot. I will give it a try. By the way, are you also using the NUR? Do you maybe know if I can configure the nix.registry to allow using NUR packages using nix shell as well?
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Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It's just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.
Does Nix have Guix-style grafts? I know that in theory that is how Guix lessens the minor-update-to-core dependency problem. But I only use Guix for dev environments so I don’t know how well it works in practice.
Nix doesn't support that officially, there is replace-dependency, but it's not in common use:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Documentation_Gaps#Does_nix_support_binary_grafting_like_guix.3F
There is also patchelf to adjust the RPATH and other stuff backed into compiled binaries, which is in common use, but not for patching.
How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.
Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years ago 😆
One year approximatively. But I elaborate a bit, I installed the minimal version, because I use bspwm. I had issues since the tty log in. Probably the xfce iso is OK.
Yep. I used the Xfce iso.
VM. Always practice new systems in a VM. Took me half a dozen tries to get a fuckup-free Void install in a VM but only one on the actual hardware.
Did you follow their docs ? Read page by page and everything should work fine.
I also haven't noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.
I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven't really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it's hard to say.
I'd definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.
( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )
Thank you that makes sense. When I get my hands on a more powerful machine and have less data constraints, I'll try Nixos again. I do miss it sometimes 😆
Very reasonable and insightful write up. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you!
I know you haven't used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?
I'm asking because I'm using an arch based distro, but I've been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they're worth trying.
Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.
Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.
I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.
Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.
edit: this isn't arguing against him, i've heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.
You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?
What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?
I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?
When you have full system crashes there is a very high chance it's the graphics drivers, journalctl -b -1 might show some information why it crashes, as it's often just the graphics output that freezes, not the rest of the system.
Another common form of crashing is just running out of memory. Linux still handles that not well at all and will just freeze for a long long long time (SysRq-F will invoke the OOM killer, which can often help and speed up the process dramatically, there are other workaround like earlyoom).
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