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Comment by tombert

4 days ago

I love NixOS, it's my daily driver on my personal laptop, but it definitely has given me more than its fair share of headaches.

If everything you're going to do is in Nixpkgs, great! Nix will mostly "Just Work" and you'll get all the nice declarative goodness that you want. Since Nixpkgs is constantly getting updated, this isn't that weird of a thing.

The thing that's been most annoying to me is when I try and run generic Linux programs, only to be unceremoniously told "You can't run generic Linux programs in NixOS because we break dynamic linking". Suddenly something that would take about ten seconds on Ubuntu involves me, at the very least, making a Flake that has an FHS environment, or me making a package so that no one else has to deal with this crap [1]. I didn't really want to know how to make my own Nix package, and I don't really want to be stuck maintaining one now, but this is just part of Nix.

This means that it's still not something I could easily recommend to someone non-technical like my parents, unlike Ubuntu. You have to be willing and able to occasionally hack up some code if you want your system to be consistently useful.

To be clear, there's a lot of stuff I really like, I don't plan on removing it from my laptop, and for something like a server (where the audience is sort of technical by design), I really have no desire to ever use anything but NixOS, but it's a little less impressive for desktop.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/366367

17 comments

tombert

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lilyball  4 days ago

You can run generic Linux stuff if you install nix-ld¹, the only tricky bit is having to customize the set of libraries given to nix-ld for your use-case. It includes various common libraries by default, but depending on what you want to run you may have to add to it.

¹https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&show=progr...

  • tombert  4 days ago

    Interesting, I didn't realize that that was an option.

    I've been getting by with buildFHSenv and Flakes, which, despite my complaints, really isn't that annoying. My goal at this point is to eventually compile all my flakes and take on Lutris.

    • Chris_Newton  3 days ago

      Interesting, I didn't realize that that was an option.

      As a fellow daily driver of NixOS, you’ve just summed up my biggest problem with it. You can do almost anything, and once you’ve figured out how and why you do it a certain way, that way often makes a lot of sense and the NixOS design can offer significant benefits compared to more traditional distros without much downside. But NixOS is out of the mainstream and its documentation is often less than ideal, so there is a steep learning curve that is relatively difficult to climb compared to a more conventional distro like Ubuntu.

      The shared object problem in particular comes up so often, particularly if you use applications or programming languages with their own ecosystem and package management, that I feel like having nix-ld installed and activated by default with a selection of the most useful SOs available out of the box would be a significant benefit to new users. Or if including it in a default installation is a step too far, many users would probably benefit from some HOWTO-style documentation so they can learn early on that nix-ld exists, how it helps with software that was built for “typical” Linux distros, why you don’t need or want it when running software that was already built for NixOS such as the contents of nixpkgs, and how to work out which shared objects an application needs and how to find and install them for use with nix-ld.

      I haven’t yet felt confident enough in my own NixOS knowledge to contribute something like that, but one nice thing about the NixOS community is that there are some genuine experts around who often pop up in these discussions to help the rest of us. I wonder if there’s scope for sponsoring some kind of “Big NixOS Documentation Project™” to fund a few of those experts to close some of those documentation gaps for the benefit of the whole community…

      1 reply →

    • lilyball  3 days ago

      I would probably still use buildFHSenv if I was trying to package up a third-party binary for installation in my configuration. My usage of nix-ld is actually to solve the problem of using VSCode Remote to connect to my NixOS machine, and in particular to allow it to run binaries it downloads onto the machine for extensions (typically LSP servers).

0x457  4 days ago

Love NixOS and Nix in general (just not the language). I've started using `steam-run` to run things I'm too smooth brain to port.

  • tombert  4 days ago

    I will say that once I found out about Flakes it bothered me a lot less. I find them a lot easier to test and it's nice to be able to easily define a custom little environment for them and then just do `nix run` afterwards.

    It's been especially useful to be able to specify exact versions of wine and winetricks installs on a per-game basis.

  • SuperSandro2000  3 days ago

    That will likely soon stop working because steam-run is no longer a grab bag for literally every library out there.

rasmus-kirk  3 days ago

Just use Nix/Home Manager on Ubuntu or something instead of NixOS. You get, by far, most of the reproducibility and none of the NixOS issues. NixOS feels more like a great server environment, but not that good of a DE.

  • tombert  3 days ago

    I don't think I agree with that. You don't get the system snapshotting, and you can't make your root filesystem tmpfs if you just use Ubuntu + Home Manager.

kombine  4 days ago

Could you setup distrobox to run regular Linux programs?

  • worble  3 days ago

    Yeah, that's exactly what I did for a while, but really once you get the hang of nix it's kind of unnecessary. I keep this bit of nix to hand for anything that I need to run

       #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell

   { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:

  (
    let base = pkgs.appimageTools.defaultFhsEnvArgs; in
    pkgs.buildFHSUserEnv (base // {
      name = "FHS";
      targetPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; [
        /* add additional packages here e.g */
        pcre
        tzdata
      ]);
      runScript = "bash";
      extraOutputsToInstall = [ "dev" ];
    })
  ).env

    Running `nix-shell` will drop you into a bash shell that looks just like a normal linux distribution with a lot of common libraries (thanks to `pkgs.appimageTools.defaultFhsEnvArgs`) and after trying to run your application you can shove whatever you need in the extra packages when it complains about a dependency being missing.

    Obviously it's a bit more work than other distros, but once nix gets it's claws into you, you'll find it hard to go back to old ways.

  • tombert  4 days ago

    Almost certainly, though I've never tried.

    I'm technical enough to where making a Flake doesn't really bother me, and it's really not as hard as I was making it out if you're already familiar with functional programming, I'm just saying it's an annoyance.

    That said, I might need to play with Distrobox, it looks like it's in nixpkgs.