Comment by Cyph0n
It’s even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.
It’s even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.
How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix.
systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = {
serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot";
path = [ pkgs.rclone ];
script = ''
rclone \
--config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \
--bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \
sync /mnt/photos/originals/ photos:
'';
unitConfig = {
RequiresMountsFor = "/mnt/photos";
};
};
systemd.timers.rclone-photos-sync = {
timerConfig = {
# Every 2 hours.
OnCalendar = "00/2:00:00";
# 5 minute jitter.
RandomizedDelaySec = "5m";
# Last run is persisted across reboots.
Persistent = true;
Unit = "rclone-photos-sync.service";
};
partOf = [ "rclone-photos-sync.service" ];
wantedBy = [ "timers.target" ];
};
Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.
I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file). But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.
NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).
Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.
Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.