A new video from Nick at The Linux Experiment. I’m also sharing the PeerTube version for the sake of trying to expand my use of PeerTube and try to expand my video platform use beyond just YouTube.
NixOS is one of the few distros that legitimately offers something different. Some nice things:
- The entire OS install is managed through config files, so instead of dealing with a billion shitty DSLs, you only deal with one.
- Because of the above, builds are also reproducible.
- Because it ditches the FHS for the Nix store, you can do things like install multiple versions of the same library side-by-side, which is impossible with traditional Linux package management.
- It has the largest package repository of any Linux distro.
- Setting up dev environments is really nice because with Nix it’s like the entire OS has VirtualEnv.
- Because of the above, “it works on my machine” is an excuse of the past.
It’s very impressive and is a welcome innovation to the Linux ecosystem. Now if only they could improve the tooling and documentation.
I find Nix to be a really esoteric platform that completely inscrutable to a regular user. The people who do use it are extremely hostile to any tools that simplify the experience for the end user like Fleek. I would not recommend it for ANY regular user in any way, shape, or form.
I have been using a nixos build as my daily non work driver for a while now. As a DevOps guy, I appreciate the define once, build almost anywhere nature. When it is time to upgrade the laptop, just copy over the config and run. Then move over my personal data.
