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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Laser@feddit.orgtome_irl@lemmy.worldme_irl
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    4 days ago

    First of all, genuinely happy for the both of you.

    Second of all, I don’t think it’s mentally healthy to have such a negative view on such a large portion of a society - personally, I’m very picky with friends and acquaintances, but the “I hate people”-attitude is rather something I associate with edgy teenagers and people who never grew out of that mindset.

    I mostly ignore that people who I don’t like exist and reduce my interactions with them to a minimum. Constantly hating just sounds exhausting, even if it’s so abstract.

    You are obviously free to do as you please; I’m just trying to provide another perspective that maybe brings more peace of mind.












  • Either my Ansible knowledge is too limited which is entirely possible, or you can’t do stuff there that’s possible with Nix. Let’s stay go with my example that you have something that requires changes in PAM. So you write an Ansible file installing the package (which is distribution-specific, so you’re losing one advantage you had over NixOS), enable the service and add your entries to the respective PAM file (e.g. login because you want to enable user authentication against kanidm on your machine). The ordering in these files matter. Sure you have insertbefore and insertafter for lineinfile and blockinfile, but this basically requires you to know the rest of the file in advance… not a problem if your system is always the same, but you don’t have the flexibility and composability that Nix offers.


  • I dunno man. I spent way less time configuring my machines on NixOS because it just works. But in fairness, that is after I have spent a lot of time learning it (compared to classic systems that is, not a lot compared to NixOS maintainers who write way better module than I do). Now that there is a foundation, I just run the updates. It’s almost scarily stable. And the ability to group related settings together is such a bliss because you no longer wonder about “what did I do to enable X”, just open the file, it’s all in one place. Stuff that could be three completely different things (e.g. a service specific config file, a PAM entry and the service activation itself in effectively 5 lines. Want to do something for multiple services? Just map over their list. Etc

    I happily used Arch for 15 years and after trying NixOS on a decommissioned machine for one day I switched over everything as fast as possible. And I did try out Ansible on Arch, so it’s not like I didn’t try management via a tool. But using a system like NixOS just solves sooo many potential issues.

    It obviously comes with downsides, for example there is no quick configuration change. Changing something small requires another evaluation. Still worth it






  • For me, the factors were:

    • the ability to split your system configuration into logical modules. Describe one logical thing in one file, no matter how many other factors are involved. Don’t want that thing anymore? Just don’t reference the module, and all changes will be reverted.
    • easily try out new configurations and roll back, regardless of underlying filesystem, without performance penalties.
    • the ability to put logic into your configuration (technically, there’s no difference between what’s typically referred to as configuration and a module in nix, though the latter usually has more “logic” and provides values with lower priority).
    • as a consequence, make modules transferable between systems. There’s e.g. a Lanzaboote module that enables Secure Boot in a really smart way on NixOS, and the configuration is in my opinion easier than on any other Linux system.
    • the reproducibility, from which the “easy reinstallation” follows