Comment by emptysongglass

2 years ago

> btrfs being unstable persists for a couple of reasons

Fedora uses it by default as does openSUSE. Meta uses it for thousands of their own servers. The very specific RAID configuration is a non-issue for 99.9 percent of people. If they have need of it they'll use something else.

> I'm pretty sure the main thing holding it back is that it's just too hard to use and people silently abandon it.

That's why you use the tools to make it easy. Use the Determinate Nix installer, then install Fleek. I haven't read the Nix manual in at least 5 years.

> But for any first-time user, I'd expect them to be SOL and stuck spending a Linux evening digging through the Nix manuals to figure out how to configure their system. (I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`)

What? This is not what most users will be doing, no.

2 comments

emptysongglass

spease 2 years ago

> What? This is not what most users will be doing, no.

Yeah, but that's what the Nix website has.

https://nixos.org/

Let's assume I already know I want to try Nix, but I don't know anything about it. I probably either:

(1) Click "Download" (https://nixos.org/download) (2) Click "Get Started" (https://nixos.org/learn), then "Install Nix" (https://nixos.org/download#download-nix)

Either way, those instructions don't offer any clear next step. I might get it installed, but what now?

Going back to "Get Started" (https://nixos.org/learn), the next options is "First steps with Nix" (https://nix.dev/tutorials/first-steps/). The options here are:

    Ad hoc shell environments
    Reproducible interpreted scripts
    Towards reproducibility: pinning Nixpkgs
    Declarative shell environments with shell.nix

None of which covers what you'd probably want to do after you've freshly installed Nix or NixOS, eg system configuration and package management.

Having officially ordained instructions isn't just a convenience for n00bs, it's also useful for knowing what needs to be maintained whenever there are changes, and consolidating effort to continually improve upon the presentation (rather than everybody having their own blog post just from their perspective).

sofixa 2 years ago

> The very specific RAID configuration is a non-issue for 99.9 percent of people

"Very specific" being the most common RAID configuration used outside of personal computing (when you have more than 2-3 disks, you aren't running RAID1/RAID0/RAID10, it's all RAID 5/6). And funnily, one of the main scenarios where an advanced filesystem is actually genuinely needed and not just a nice to have, is when you have lots of disks.