I’ve seen a lot of talks on the benefits of immutable distros (specifically Fedora Silverblue) but it always seemed to me as more of a hassle. Has anyone here been daily driving an immutable distro? Would you say it’s worth the effort of getting into?

  • fourstepper@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    How long did it take you to migrate from the distribution before and what’s your experience in this space in general?

    I like the idea of a declarative configuration, but I find it hard to justify when Ansible has the potential to do the job 99% as effectively.

    Also, what do you feel are the most “killer features” in nixOS?

    • sntx@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve recently switched over to NixOS in gradual rollouts to my systems:

      Stage 0 (~2h):

      • Installed NixOS with Gnome on my Laptop for testing an getting a feel for it (I prefer testing on bare-metal initially)
      • Tweaked it a bit via the config: removed gnome apps that came with the preset, installed all programs I needed and tested them

      Stage 1 (~3d):

      • Installed NixOS minimal on my primary system
      • Set up sway according to the wiki
      • Bodged together something similar to my previous arch setup, mostly my linking old config files with nix to programs installed with nix

      Stage 2 (~4d):

      • Moved all configs I could from my linked config files to the nix module declarations
      • Seperated config file into files ordered as like config-tree
      • Achieved a similar working state to my previous arch install
      • Moved channel from 22.11 to unstable (rolling release)

      Stage 3 (~7d):

      • Set up home-manager
      • Finally moved all config declarations into nix modules, no non-nix files left in my config
      • Also copied the config to my laptop, a single activation and I switched from gnome to sway without any problems

      Stage 4 (~21d):

      • Looked at a bunch of other peoples system configs
      • Recreated everything as a flake, similar to dunklecat’s config from sourcehut
      • Applied the config to my primay system and laptop
      • Wrote a bunch more config modules

      Stage 4.5:

      • Wrote some tools to make moving around nix easier for me, but mostly to get accustomed to the ecosystem

      Stage 5 (~6d):

      • Created and applied further system configs for a hetzner server & VMs

      Stage 6 (tbd):

      • Refining my config
      • Adding further modules

      Edit 1 (added personal experience): I’m a computer science student and have been using *nix as a daily driver for half a decade, my previous daily driver was arch for about two years. I spend ~1000h/y coding on non-University or Work related projects. I’m at a point where I can typically pick up a the basics of a new language in two to three weeks and write simple programs with it -> library/specific knowledge comes with usage.