Containerization / declarative configuration management / reproducible builds / immutable distros are hot right now because people have for a long time been sick and tired of their shit breaking when they upgrade, and are starting to realize that encapsulating changes in atomic transactions and keeping track of them better is a better way of doing things.
In other words, NixOS is riding the wave generated by the popularization of stuff like Docker, Ansible, CI/CD, etc.
Growth have been fairly organic . number of contributors grew by 28 percent this year. there are a lot of users so given that a percent of them will do some form of advocacy that will probably lead to more users and there will be a relatively large amount of people saying they adopted it.
It’s finally ready for mass adoption, IMO. Also, things take a long time to catch on and now that flakes are fairly stable and a lot of pedagogy is popping up in the form of other people’s configs (and the documentation is being actively improved to hopefully someday meet the high standards of Arch), people feel empowered to try it out.
IOG uses it for their entire stack which is packed with incredibly solid (IMO) software engineering decisions from top to bottom.
I tried it because I wanted to run a Cardano stake pool and develop DApps for the Cardano ecosystem. Their build-from-source instructions made me realize how much better it would be to install it with Nix instead of the cargo cult/curse of the current era, a Docker container.
still seems wierd to me. materials do not sound like practice at all and I guess method as they are written often but like I feel like pencils are materials. just feels wierd based on the definition.
They’re the company that created Cardano. They’re well-respected for their code quality and the use of formal methods and academic peer review to develop their software. They started out an enemy of most Haskell devs then won many over with their massive open source contributions to the Haskell developer experience. Their Nix based Haskell dev environment is THE best way to use Haskell with Nix.
They used to be called IOHK or Input Output Hong Kong which is still reflected on their GitHub.
No way. It’s still a specialist OS. There’s no way I’m putting this into the hands of a linux newbie or even the average linux user. There config still doesn’t have a UI, the flakes vs non-flakes debate is still in full swing (nixpkgs doesn’t have flakes), the doc is far, far, far from user friendly, writing a nix package is still not easy, and so much more.
Nix for sure was (and probably is) ahead of its time, but the UX is amongst the worst I’ve experienced - and I’ve written init and upstart services and configured my network with ipconfig before networkmanager was stable.
Did you just post a license for your humblebrag soapbox rant about NixOS?
Edit: I’ll leave some points where I agree since you’re very fixated on/preoccupied with who won this debate (or something). In the long run, most Nix users are wishing for a complete rewrite of NixOS with Nix’s modern approach codified as standard. After all, to your point, Nix is just a massive pile of Perl and Bash under the hood. It could unquestionably be more capable if they had the benefit of hindsight (or a proper type system built into the language) like GUIX which uses Scheme as their DSL has. AFAIK, though, Nix flakes are a feature that GUIX badly needs.
For GUIX: Does anyone know about content-addressed derivations in GUIX? I figure that might also be a place where Nix bests GUIX but perhaps some GUIX(pronounced geeks) can correct me before I search for answers.
I don’t really care to be honest. Clearly, I’m not as smart as you and would be in hell with maintaining my rock-solid stable nix-config if I had your 10x dev brain.
I don’t think they believe that; I think they either (a) think a human lawyer would understand it during the class-action suit after the the AI scrapes it anyway, or (b) more likely, they’re doing it to make a point as a matter of principle.
Either seems pretty fucking reasonable, to be honest!
It’s just noise. Assuming US jurisdiction where many of the AI companies are based; either AI scraping is fair use, in which case the license is meaningless, or AI scraping is not fair use, in which case they already have the copyright.
Mass adoption doesn’t necessarily mean Linux newbie. NixOS seems to be targeting the DevOps crowd with its stability/immutability – that is, people who would be comfortable building their system from a config file that doesn’t have a UI. They’re already basically doing that with other tools.
I don’t know a single devops who uses it. Not a single person in the tech companies I’ve been in had even heard of it. When I presented it to resolve problems it could resolve, one response was “but I watched a video that said it’s hard to learn” (one from distrotube, I think) and another was “it doesn’t work on mac, does it?” and that was that.
I find it actually incredible that you don’t know anyone in DEVOPS that uses it. Either you’re at a giant company with a custom stack that replicates its functionality (Meta employees that I asked didn’t know about it) or you don’t talk to other devs. It’s like THE devops tool nowadays (only taking a second place to Docker/OCIA).
Totally agreed. That’s a big ask, though, because Arch’s docs are the gold standard.
I’m working on converting to impermanence mode this week and let’s just say I’d be done by now if the answers were even close to the quality found in Arch’s wiki.
Well, I think containers do deliver. With Docker, I can run an app without having to use a special OS. Also, it’s quite rich to call something a cargo cult when working with a block chain.