NixOS appreciation post
NixOS appreciation post
So after being a long-time Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/etc user, I finally decided to give NixOS a try after the recent RHEL news.
And BOY and I blown away. You can do so much more than I thought possible with automation on NixOS. It's incredible!
Since I"m so new, I do have a question for you all: What's your go-to resource for learning Nix/NixOS?
Thanks!
Welcome! I hope you enjoy NixOS =)
Ah yes, the eternal question, where to learn. I'll just link you to a comment I wrote a couple days ago: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/254645
Thank you! A similar question: Should I just go straight to learning Flakes?
I'm going to pour over your configs, thanks for the links!I didn't stay long with the traditional setup since Flakes are a lot better imo. Personally I'd recommend it, especially to replace channels in the traditional NixOS setup which are not designed well since they break reproducibility.
Also, if you do want to look through my configurations, I just added a small readme to my repository, it's under the about tab. Large configurations like this can be intimidating from my experience starting out so I hope it helps a bit :^)
I think that despite the fact that they're not officially stable, flakes are not going away. So yes it does make sense to learn flakes, but there's nothing wrong with learning it along the classic way, they have a lot in common.
I think Flakes are quite useful and, although they might be somewhat challenging to wrap your head around, isn't really all too hard to actually set up once you have your configuration.nix and hardware-configuration.nix. Here's the video tutorial that got me started on my Flakes journey, and here's a really good set of dotfiles to use as an example for when you want to start modularising your configurations. So to answer your question, I think you should, yes.
I've recently switched to NixOS, and what's actually been super helpful has been GPT-4. Mostly because I have no idea wtf I'm doing lol. It's not always right, but asking it something like "Write a shell.nix file that downloads poetry2nix version 1.2.3 and uses that instead of what's in nixpkgs" has been a treat. Even when it makes errors, it's generally been able to get me started with the right approach.
It's also been super helpful when I try copy/pasting some snippet that doesn't work because the author wrote it as a flake, and I'm trying to use a
shell.nixfile, and somehow the imports are different or other oddities like that. NixOS' great weakness has been lack of documentation, and being able to ask something interactively that has scoured all nix docs across the web has been great.