Mastodawn

Julia Evans Nov 14, 2023

some notes on nix flakes https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/11/notes-on-nix-flakes/

Some notes on nix flakes

Julia Evans

Julia Evans Nov 14, 2023

a few people in the replies are asking why someone might want to use nix as an OS / to manage your python packages / to manage your config files.

does anyone want to share their reasons for doing those things? I don't really know.

(please give examples of some specific problems Nix solves for you and what you like about it, don't just say "it's reproducible/declarative” :) )

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akavel Nov 14, 2023

@b0rk As to managing an OS: at one employer, I once installed some package in Ubuntu to try something; didn't solve my need so I uninstalled it back. But after the uninstall, my graphical environment was somehow left altered in a weird way that I had no idea how to fix back. On NixOS, this can't really happen, an uninstall guarantees that the OS will be in exactly identical state as before the install (unless you broke hardware somehow...). Also experimenting with kernel flags is crazy easy.

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akavel

@b0rk (Though notably, what I wrote above was not completely true before flakes - but is true with flakes 🥳🥰😍🚀. Also it's not like Nix has no issues - I only use full NixOS on my non-critical machines, because sometimes random but very needed things that should be trivial to do are crazy difficult to set up in NixOS. Which reminds me EXTREMELY much of Linux in the '90s.)