Nerdrotic
But at the same time, it's not like OpenAI is not eating its own dog food. Why haven't the experts built up A.I. systems internally? Showed off what A.I. is capable of beyond demos and hype engines?
Using unstable will result in breaking changes giving you a headache. Trying to run a bleeding edge modern laptop with some of the absolute latest software versions is only going to blow up on you and you'll be stuck trying to work around upstream breaking changes that are not even the fault of NixOS.
Lately, I use NixOS on servers mostly without flakes and use flakes and Home Manager on Win11 WSL & macOS Darwin. However, NixOS on my laptop and workstation blew up on me with a blank black screen on every boot. There were no code changes just updating stable / unstable nixpkgs and it refused to boot. A.I. couldn't figure out what the problem was. It wasn't the video drivers; it was some kind of kernel bug with the latest kernel that bit me. I ended up with a bricked system even after burning a new ISO and wiping it out, the new installation failed in the exact same way. Trying an older kernel didn't fix it either. It would boot from flash ISO install everything, but first boot resulted in the black screen. It was eventually fixed 2-3 days later but I had a need to fix that laptop urgently.
I decided to give Omarchy a spin and was impressed; I replaced NixOS on my laptop and primary desktop workstation with Omarchy. Servers are still NixOS. While I built most things myself in NixOS, having that out of box experience with Omarchy and the fact that I can just tell the A.I. to fix and configure stuff was a game changer.
In the last year or so, A.I. has gotten much better with configuring NixOS. Omarchy provides skills.md files to train Omarchy on how to configure and fix things. This improves the overall A.I. experience on Omarchy. Without any A.I. skills the frontier A.I. agents have gotten much better at working with NixOS.
If the NixOS Community writes some skills for A.I. agents, it should vastly improve the quality of using A.I. agents to configure NixOS.
Where NixOS really shines is in solving software development problems. Writing a flake.nix file and dropping it into your repo then any users with Nix installed will execute that flake.nix via direnv when changing directories into the cloned project directory. Thus, installing all the of the project's dependencies including the language. Therefore, Node.js / Python / Ruby can be installed per project instead of per user or globally on the system. Imagine you have an old Python project that won't run with the latest Python. This is no longer a problem because when you change directories into project1 and it installs the versions you need then when you exit the project folder all the dependencies are de-referenced from the /nix/store and the environment destroyed. Change to project2 and it spins up an entirely different set of dependencies. This instantly solves many problems from a newbie developer joining the team and being immediately able to clone and build a project to ensure all the devs have the same flake.nix so they all immediately reproduce the project perfectly ensuring all the proper dependencies are working. You can also put the flake.nix in your CI / CD pipeline to ensure nightly builds are working same as the developers. Spread this across Production, QA / Test, & Development environments. You can create a custom ISO installer including your configuration in the ISO and you can PXE network boot it too. You can have a variety of computer configurations in the same Nix set of configuration files.
Nix the package manager can be installed on any Linux distribution. I am likely going to install Nix on Omarchy so I can use it for development purposes. I find Nix more robust over MISE which Omarchy depends upon for most of their development tooling.
Nix excels at solving real world problems for developers. No more "Well, it worked on my machine". You setup a flake.nix in your code repo along with direnv and even that new junior dev can merely clone the repo and all the dependencies are installed by the flake.nix configuration file. Including the language and IDE configuration for the team. i.e. tabs vs spaces and whatnot. The same flake.nix can be applied to your CI / CD to help with reliable builds. You can also use it to create Kubernetes and other containers or a bare metal NixOS server. Keep all the configs in git and run them straight from the repo.
It's great for ensuring your devs don't break the freaking build by updating something with npm, etc. You should audit anything you install due to the severe threat of supply chain attacks. Recently impacting Node.js and Arch Linux AUR, etc.
Yes, LLMs can write quite a lot of Nix but they don't necessarily get down to the nitty gritty best practices. So you need to be careful with it. You should also audit your configuration for security issues.
Meanwhile the pirates are laughing their arse off...
Type in the name of any media and you can have it in less than 5min with none of the silly DRM restrictions. All you need is the know how.
Until they make it that easy and stop trying to screw over the consumer. They will lose to piracy.
Game of Thrones was the most pirated show on the planet. Eventually HBO realized what they had to do. They offered an HBO streaming subscription globally everywhere for a reasonable price. It bypassed 50 year old cable tv agreements, etc. People could cancel the subscription at any time. But they also had access to the full HBO catalog of shows. Although it didn't stop piracy entirely it did reduce it significantly. HBO made a large profit off the decision.
Open your eyes, figure out what people really want by analyzing what makes piracy better than the legit marketplace. Then do what HBO did and set aside your old school perspective and look at the larger untapped market. Restricting access and going after pirates does not increase your market share. But catering to what people want will open up millions in sales. If you just make it crazy easy and consumer friendly without overcharging.