Yeah. I had a similar experience. My first successful install, following the docs, didn’t have a network stack. It turns out that the docs are not representative of what’s considered best practices at this point. I also don’t care for needing a new DSL for a single use case.

So, for me, it’s a non-starter. Fedora Atomic is meeting my needs nicely at this point. NixOS has brought some excellent ideas to the forefront and is a great match for some people. I’ll pass until I can use my JSON/YAML/TOML and the docs are useable.

Even when using in a basic way, I think it has one very tangible advantage: the fact that you can “compartmentalize” different aspects of your configuration.

Let’s say I set up a specific web service that I want to put behind a reverse proxy, and it uses a specific folder that doesn’t exist yet, like Navidrome which is a web-based audio player. It requires a set of adjustments of different system parts. My nix file for it looks like this:

{ config, ... }:

let
  domain = "music." + toString config.networking.domain;
in
  {
    services.navidrome = {
      enable = true;
      settings = {
        Address = "127.0.0.1";
        Port = 4533;
        MusicFolder = "/srv/music";
        BaseUrl = "https://" + domain;
        EnableSharing = true;
        Prometheus.Enabled = true;
        LogLevel = "debug";
        ReverseProxyWhitelist = "127.0.0.1/32";
      };
    };

    services.nginx = {
      upstreams = {
        navidrome = {
          servers = {
            "127.0.0.1:${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.Port}" = {};
          };
        };
      };
    };

    services.nginx.virtualHosts."${domain}" = {
      onlySSL = true;
      useACMEHost = config.networking.domain;
      extraConfig = ''
        include ${./authelia/server.conf};
      '';
      locations."/" = {
        proxyPass = "http://navidrome";
        recommendedProxySettings = false;
        extraConfig = ''
          include ${./authelia/proxy.conf};
          include ${./authelia/location.conf};
        '';
      };
    };

    systemd.tmpfiles.settings."navidrome-music-dir"."${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.MusicFolder}" = {
      d = {
        user = "laser";
        mode = "0755";
      };
    };
    systemd.services.navidrome.serviceConfig.BindReadOnlyPaths = ["/run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf"];
      
    security.acme.certs."${config.networking.domain}".extraDomainNames = [ "${domain}" ];
  }

All settings related to the service are contained in a single file. Don’t want it anymore? Comment it out from my main configuration (or whereever it’s imported from) and most traces of it are gone, the exception being the folder that was created using systemd.tmpfiles. No manually deleting the link from sites-available or editing the list of domains for my certificate. The next generation will look like the service never existed.

And in my configuration, at least the port could be changed and everything would still work – I guess there is room for improvement, but this does what I want pretty well.

Not really, other than banning those who disagreed publicly

Foxes are like that though.

They look cute and cuddly… The trustworthy kind, then they bite your hand off and laugh at you.

NixOS is probably a bit more confusing than most Linux distros, but it has a huge amount of advantages too. It has very up to date software and probably never has dependency issues.

I’m running openSUSE because I like lizards.

Guix doesn’t use systemd(it uses Shepherd)

Just to clarify, I wouldn’t recommend putting everything in a single file, but rather modularize the configuration.

I also came from Arch, but have since abandoned it, and I don’t think I want to use distributions for myself that use the the classic imperative concept. One you get a better understanding of it, it makes so much more sense.

It build in a sandbox, but it’s not run in a sandbox.

No, because it miss an ui for the config changes.

I think NixOS is also doing some layering that could cost performance. I am unsure about the storage size, if it is much more like flatpak and snaps that I also dislike.

i nuked my nixos install twice to install guix and twice I went back to my nix setup. GuixSD is missing a certain polish to it. It feels like it’s on the way there but probably not yet…

the second time was just last week, after setup on sway, I installed flatpak apps and tried setting up nix-env for packages, some XDG_DATA_DIR fucked up and I couldn’t even see the installed packages or start them from a terminal

servers are also slow and rebuilding is a fucking pain

Damn you broke my brain for a second there. I thought you meant that nixos replaced k8s, and was wondering what the hell are you talking about.