Hi all,
I’ve been using NixOS for a while now (About a month now) and I’ve been loving it, but I’ve had some thoughts lately.
I understand that Nix(OS)'s claim to fame is the fact that packages are reproducible. All dependencies are versioned and all packages are rollback-able (although not sandboxed). With proper maintenance (nix-collect-garbage mostly), the problem with space is mostly mitigated.
But what if a package’s dependencies are out of date? These just stay out of date with their possible security problems as well. Not just that but it’s (nearly) impossible to actually do your own manual imperative editing of packages to solve a quick problem since everything is declarative.
Not just this, but Nix uses mostly its own configuration methodology, so isn’t this a maintenance nightmare as config files change and options are added/removed? Home manager is a prime example of this potential problem.
Plus more technologies being introduced on top of it to solve problems that seem already solved? (Flakes mostly come to mind).
I have come to the realiziation that, unlike a traditional distro like Arch/Alpine which I used previously, if maintenance dies I cannot feasibly maintain it myself, since it’s mostly “magic”. The upkeep of all the configurations plus all the dependency packages, and making sure each package compiles and matches the build configuration is a nightmare. I can barely do it with my own personal projects.
Anyways that’s kinda it just expressing thoughts about it. I do love Nix(OS) and plan to continue using it. It’s amazing, and its capabilities are matched by few to none, and from a user perspective it is an extremely seamless and simple OS. It’s mostly from a maintainer perspective that I had.
Most derivations are pretty flexible; the ones that aren’t, however, will require you to write your own overlay to fix them. Or just fork them entirely. This is one of the advantages in Nix in that you can create reproducibility at any granularity. Writing and using your own derivation is complex though. Most packages provide more than enough knobs to change their configuration on their own in my experience though — my current Nix build uses no derivations I had to write myself.
Home Manager and Nix itself are versioned so I don’t understand your complaint about config changing. If you’re happy with how your system works just don’t update it to a newer version. If you do, as in any other software, you risk breakage. The advantage of Nix in this scenario obviously is that rolling back in the case of an upgrade going wrong is incredibly trivial.
I could’ve worded the configuration part a bit better. My gripe wasn’t necessarily with that, but more with “If I ever had to make my own package from scratch including dependencies, this would be practically impossible” Nix’s derivations and other packaging information is crazy complex and keeping track of versioning, etc. is a nightmare. I think often about doomsday scenarios for systems. It happens, just look at CentOS and all that, so my main thing was if something like that happened, could I maintain the packages I use manually, and the answer was no. Of course I’m not in a doomsday situation, so I’m fine with it as it is. It’s just a thought I had, and that was my conclusion.
It’s not as hard as you think, since you can just copy some other package for a skeleton and substitute your own files. There are just a few files to do a basic package
NixOS packaging is really not complex. The ease and speed of creating a Nix package is a large part of the reason for why there are so many packages. I regularly make packages myself and for the most part it is very simple.
Derivations are kinda complicated but you can definitely get them if you try! There’s nothing super magical about them. As opposed to the rest of Nix which can feel extremely and unfortunately magical…
Gotcha I’ll start playing around with derivations. I also just came to the realization that because of the magic of Nix, I can try these things, and if it breaks it, I can just roll back.