this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
163 points (79.6% liked)
Linux
48329 readers
639 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
I still need to give NixOS the college try. The docs are slowly getting better but other than that I have heard great things from all over the Internet about it once you get your head around it. I failed at figuring it out on my own but the day will come where it makes sense I'm sure.
I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they're an essential building block for anything that isn't utterly trivial.
the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.
Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don't know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.
lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it's a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it's slightly different in important ways. there's no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.
For learning how to write and modify packages there is the nixpkgs manual, which also contains a section on writing modules.
Between zero-to-nix.com and nixos.wiki, I think there are enough docs to get started with it quickly.