- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Seems like this distro is getting a lot of traction recently. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good?
Seems like this distro is getting a lot of traction recently. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good?
Declarative? Could you explain?
Oh my bad. Yeah you can configure almost anything in a declarative way on the
/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
file:Or
You can define a lot more (programs, users) and then you build the config file to take effect. By default NixOS is immutable so you can’t change anything in the root partition and if there is something that broke you can rollback to a previous build!
That is very interesting! Thank’s mate!
Your whole system is defined in a file called
configuration.nix
. This file describes everything about your system: all packages installed, which Desktop Environment / Window Manager to use, and also configuration for almost everything (e.g. zsh or neovim). When “switching” (which is basically installing/updating the system), Nix looks at the configuration and changes your system according to what you’ve declared in theconfiguration.nix
, installing or uninstalling packages for instance.So, the state of your system is “declared” in a single file, which can be tracked in git or backed up wherever. If you have mulitple systems, you can also share parts of your config between them, which makes configuring and customizing stuff a lot easier.
There are a lot of other aspects, but thats the basic gist of it
Is it a big learning curve? Is this the emacs equivalent of OS configuration/installation?
edit: another question - Could I play around with it by installing in qemu and if I like that, take my configuration.nix from qemu and install it as my main OS?
I’d say it’s a pretty steep curve unfortunately, and nixOS is also not perfect, mind you
/nix
. Packages installed with nix are patched to work that way, but things not installed with it might not run out of the boxAs for trying it out, yeah copying the config from the vm should work (except for maybe some hardware-specific stuff). remember to backup your stuff just in case lol
That sounds really cool… so you could just take that file, do a clean install of nix, then put that file back and it’ll install all your old packages and stuff?
Basically yes
you could also go so far as to wipe your root partition (except for some selected dirs) on every boot, although I don’t do that myself: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence