Comment by zie
Comment by zie 4 days ago
So a server that's dedicated to well-supported(by nixos) services running NixOS is awesome. it's easy to upgrade every 6 months and generally very painless. Everything else is a PITA though. Of course if you use an LTS like Debian Stable or Ubuntu, you only have to upgrade every 5-ish years, so unless you always need the latest and greatest release of something, it maybe isn't worth the hassle.
Trying to hack on other people's junk with NixOS is just asking for pain. Just use Ubuntu LTS like everyone else. That's generally easy and painless.
"Trying to hack on other people's junk with NixOS is just asking for pain."
To me that's a large part of the very definition of a useful general purpose OS is that it's flexible and enables you to do whatever you need to do today, without the developers having previously somehow planned and provided for exactly that thing.
It's like the systemd argument all over. The exact thing systemd aims to prevent is the exact thing that made the original unix so powerful and useful that 40 years after architecting it, it still worked because they didn't try to think of every possibility, they gave you a toolbox that let you do whatever you might need to do. Where systemd sees a shell script as "unmanaged chaos" I see "unconstrained utiliy", a useful toolbox including a saw that doesn't have it's own opinions about me what boards I can cut.
If "Trying to hack on other people's junk with NixOS is just asking for pain." that is basically the definition of "this is not a useful operating system that empowers me to get things done". It's useful maybe as a crafted firmware for a static device.
(Not saying that nixos inflexibility is driven by the same paternal "we'll give you the whitelist of actions Poettering thinks are valid" attitude as systemd. In nixos it's merely a natural consequence of indirection and layering. They aren't trying to remove any agency from the user/admin, it's just the simple indirection itself that makes pre-planned and standardized things easier at the expense of anything direct and unplanned becoming harder.
Like instead of having an OS that may or may not be driven by ansible, let's replace the OS with just ansible, and now there is no way to do anything any other way except by figuring out how to write a playbook to do it.)