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A comment on Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer? by mkingston on Monday August 12, 2019 @05:29AM (#20673816)
NixOS is great. I use it as my daily driver. But. In my experience, your distro will never have all the software you would like in its repos. And I've found this is true of NixOS also. So it should be mentioned that some software does not play nicely with it [0][1].

Because some things will be missing from distro repos, packaging is, to me, quite a valuable skill. Compare, for example, the packages for autorandr for Nix and Arch [2][3]. When I started using Arch I found the Arch package fit much better within my understanding of the world. I expect most here would find the same.

Here is what is essentially the manual for Nix packaging [4]. Personally I'd say that if you're unwilling to consume that, eventually you are going to encounter a frustrating problem with Nix that you cannot solve, and potentially regret using it. Though, using a VM or potentially a container might get you around some/many of those issues. I should also mention that Nix Pills may be worth a read before beginning to use NixOS- it's what convinced me to switch, in fact.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522822/different-me...

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/36759

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=autor...

[3] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/e380ef398761206954e514...

[4] https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer? by jchw on Monday August 12, 2019 @10:57AM (#20675968)
I’ve had no issue contributing to fix small holes in NixOS, and Docker covers the rest. So far the only thing that I’ve found genuinely challenging is getting complex binary software running. I have a Nix expression for IDA free but it can only use bundled Qt. VMWare Workstation I outright can’t use, which is a shame since I have a Pro license, but it woke me up to how great KVM is, so there’s that.

I would not recommend NixOS to everyone, but I definitely would recommend it to the type of person who wants to automate their system.

[ Parent | on HN ]