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Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml demesisx @infosec.pub

Principal Skinner on Immutable Distros

Am I out of touch?

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

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  • 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.

    • 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.

      • No end of interesting shit you can do in Nix, at one point I had zfs and ipfs entries in one of my configs. I got away from it all before flakes started to get popular.

        I tried it as a docker host; the declarative formatting drove me around the bend. I get a fair bit of disaster proofing on my docker host with git and webhooks, besides using Proxmox/ZFS to host it all and back it up.

        • nd of interesting shit you can do in Nix, at one point I had zfs and ipfs entries in one of my configs. I got away from it all before flakes started to get popular.

          I tried it as a docker host; the declarative formatting drove me around the bend. I get a fair bit of disaster proofing on my docker host with git and webhooks, besides us

          I suspect that the whole Docker thing will improve exponentially now that Nix is on the Docker's radar. I found the OCI implementation to be superior to the actual Docker implementation in Nix.....at least for now. I think the way that Docker isolates things to layers is the biggest barrier to them working together seamlessly at the moment....but I think they'll start to converge technolgically over the coming 10 years to the point where they might work together as a standard someday.

    • They're the bee's knees if you have a homelab, though.

    • i mean, provided that the OS has a proper graphical configurator (like most normie OSes), isn't being declarative just a straight upgrade? Configure everything once when installing and then you never have to repeat that process again.

      • I think your "proper graphical configurator" is doing some heavy lifting there. Of course, there's no such thing right now, so you're dealing with the coding yourself in a pretty oddly designed syntactical language, and the terrible official documentation that is the current state of affairs to do it with.

        Other than that, sure, a declaritive and atomic OS would be the way to go.

        • the thing is that distros like fedora and ubuntu have had them for ages

          • I thought you meant for a declarative OS like Nix. Which does not have a GUI configurator, nor does any comparable declarative OS. Isn't that what we've been talking about this entire thread?

49 comments