NixOS: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Great to see yet more vids on NixOS. For those wanting to try, I strongly suggest installing Nix on your current distro and/or NixOS in a VM. It will be way less frustrating. You can take advantage of many features of Nix without running NixOS itself. Ideally set up a system configured as you like with all you need in a VM, and use the configs to build your configured system right away when you do the real install. You won't have to redo anything, so no wasted time but a "safe" learning environment.

Windows 10 + WSL2 with Linux = best of both worlds

@NoBoilerplate recently moved to NixOS but I have been struggling with a few things here and there. One was outdated packages like obsidian which you have made a video about previously so i thought you or another follower might have come across this issue already. I wanted to try to build the package myself using the updated code but the hashing etc confused me a bit. Any suggestions anyone?

I wonder how hard it would be to convert an Ubuntu/Debian-based embedded system to use nixos instead.

This video got me to use Nixos, and boy have I been enjoying it. Things occasionally get stuck but mostly just work! It's great, and so much better to work with than my previous experience with Linux and definitely better than with windows.

Hey, would you recommend NixOS to a beginner?

No thanks. I'll stick with Manjaro.

The fromTOML piece is clever, but...

It would make it impossible to use functions provided by the nix language. I extensively use functions to programmatically generate configuration, especially when the config uses the same data multiple places in the file. That is, I apply the DRY (don't repeat yourself) rule.

Using variables to reference other settings is also extremely convenient. Set your hostname once, reference it as config.networking.hostName everywhere.

You could also use fromJSON, but again, please don't.

I really like the rebuild script you wrote!

you can use something like the following nix to add it to your configuration.nix :D
This will make sure its always available on your PATH

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
(writeShellApplication {
name = "foo";
text = ''
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
pushd ~/dotfiles/nixos/
nvim oatman-pc.nix
alejandra . &>/dev/null
git diff -U0 *.nix
echo "NixOS Rebuilding..."
sudo nixos-rebuild switch &>nixos-switch.log || (
cat nixos-switch.log | grep --color error && false)
gen=$(nixos-rebuild list-generations | grep current)
git commit -am "$gen"
popd
'';
})
];

i never knew i could use auto update wtfff

Im in a class for linux server config and have been using it as an end user for about two months now, and I gotta say, this is a lot of benefits! I'm probably gonna keep being on Mint Cinammon for now since it works fine enough for me thusfar and I do not have a lot of energy flexibility at the moment, but I'll definitely bookmark this for later.

a bit of an off topic question but since u mentioned you use linux to make these videos as well, what video editor do you use?

wow thank you!! I will try it. Looking for new daily driver distro.

thoughts on Guix? I personally prefer and use it.

Nix has always seemed a bit weird to me because while it offers a very unique feature set, it is a feature set that exists by restricting you to only work the "nix way". Like, of course, your system would be declarative when you have to write a declarative config file to get your OS working properly.

And I'm sure that it's definitely far smoother about it than something like an Ansible config, but it does make me wonder. NixOS has a high barrier to entry, so if you took that time and energy spent learning Nix and invested it instead in writing documentation, a bash script, or Ansible config for your system, how much of an edge does Nix retain?

Reproducibility, stability, declarativeness. These are not features exclusive to Nix. If all one wants was some middle-ground between up-to-date packages and stability, then you can use Tumbleweed with snapper rollback or Fedora with either Silverblue or Workstation (rpm-ostree and dnf both have rollback). Bash scripts and these solutions may not seem as elegant as Nix, but Nix is hardly devoid of issues.

The documentation is sparse, especially if you come from Arch. The support for SELinux is nonexistent, and I imagine AppArmor as well, considering the policy files would likely differ between it and the conventional OSs. The Nix language is unpleasant, and some things are not yet well supported (you can install flatpaks, but they're not declarative).

I'm not saying that Nix doesn't have its place, but I thdon't see what makes Nix so special. Even the repo package count is questionable. How many of those packages are well-maintained, how many are kept up-to-date? And really, beyond a certain point, does it matter?

are you still using nixos

I dont use now arch btw

No boilerplate starts with boilerplate greeting and boilerplate backstory.

Guix is better

I use NixOs btw! ❄️ 😆

I was planning to switch to this great distro for a long time (and from MacOS, bcs god bless Linux) And I did! Thanks to you. But I have encountered a big problem, which I guess you already solved: Neovim inside NixOS. NixOS's biggest difference is it's not working binaries since it needs other dependencies and it's not the way NixOS runs, so for example AppImages doesn't work out of the box. Therefore, this situation has got me, I can't use Treesitter and can't install LSP's via Mason because installed LSP's are binaries. Can you enlighten me if you can about how did you solve this problem?
And is there any other negative aspect did you encounter that you can tell to give advice a new NixOS learner?

I know basically nothing about coding and I didn’t understand a word of this video, but I still watched the whole 15min of this shabang of an engaging saga that it was. It’s been a while since I’ve felt so dumb. Thank you for the reality check.

My arch system "broke" just once in the last 4 years.

Still, next time it breaks (it eventually will), I promise I will try NixOS.

Wow. You can really make someone excited about NixOS. I will definetly try it out and use your video to help me along the way. Thanks! :)

Just to mention a thing about NixOS having way more packages than aur. Does it "really" have more packages? I am currently using NixOS and what I see is packages for separate fonts, libraries, many packages are poorly structured and don't have lts versions of the same software, so sometimes you can't just declare an older version and more modern version of the same software to be pulled without writing some workarounds. If you have to declaratively point to each separate element from fonts to drivers, libraries, software, then, yes you will end up having more repositories than anything else. I can't say that these packages are very well maintained, sometimes packages have broken links and you have to figure out what to do about it and it's not pleasant.

It's like Ansible for any other linux distro.

ephemeral environments seem really cool

Tris, You're awesome and you got me converted to Nix. Loving it so far!

I like home-manager, it just extends the NixOS declarative single place configuration thing to my user settings. I have my ZSH, GIT and whatnot config there.

Thanks for making this video! I learned about Nix about 2 years ago when searching for an heavily customizeable bleeding edge OS that doesn't have as annoying quirks as Arch or Gentoo, and I'm still mad I only then learned it exists. It's by far the best thing to happen to Linux distros since the invention of package managers.

I have tried nixos right after the video came out. After 3 weeks of experience, my advice is RTFM. Specifically the nix docs.There is probably a guide for whatever you"re trying to do

You sound like if Tom Scott took a lighter coffee today and decided to talk about Linux distros instead of weird places around the globe; and I love it ❄
I wonder how long it may take for NixOS to overtake Arch, with such a large difference in safety and simplicity? Great video, overall!

But does it use systemd?

Not done watching so you probably answer this, but how have I never heard of nixos?

Stability and freshness are mutually excluding each other. Zero discussion, even developers are warning users that nightly releases are used at risk of user.

Config file is effectively equal to modern python environment managers like poetry. You use cli to manage packages and config is updated after that. Or you can write changes in config. Unique selling point of configs are either malicious advertising or unintended stupidity.

Reverting to previous environment as a selling point is effectively caters to people who don't want to write bash script.

NixOS is good looking Linux distro, but this video is making zero reasoning to switch even from debian derivatives.

welcome to the club

It's been a joy to watch your videos as a content creator and as a software engineer. You're given me some good ideas for building my tutorials without having to sift through an hour long live code session. If I use markdown like you do, I can do most of what I want and then add animations and audio in editing.

Ill never get bleeding edge users
How do you put up with a random automatic update fucking up your system???

I'm curious about the comment that Apple hardware is not as good as they claim. It's relevant to some decisions that I need to make.

the one file you have to adjust to do thing is so close to being something that a non tech person would(not could) do if it was just given a gui it might be a thing that someone who dose not want to deal with linux bs would like

goddamit now i have shiny object syndrome on my OS, maybe i should go try nix

Can one also save all Firefoxx config with all extension in the same file?

This video is so straight-to-the-point and well made that it may have just convinced me to reinstall my OS. insanely good video for what seems like a perfect OS

Hey Man, whenever I try to Install Etcher in Nixos via the nix configuration file it always gives me an error of Missing EOL when I rebuild. I switched to Nixos Unstable and still nothing. Not much available on the internet.. Can you please help?

I hadn't really heard anything about nixos before this video. I was sold almost immediately and now have over 2500 lines of config files

Been using linux for 6 months. What drives me insane and i could not adjust is the command line copy paste difference. crtl+shift is needed. I keep killing my dev server because I want to copy using ctrl+c. Can that be fixed? Everytime i mess that up, I want macOS again just because of the superior keyboard layout

same, i went from archlinux to nixos, because of "dependency hell" on archlinux.
archlinux: glibc version mismatch errors, can install only one rustc version ...
i love nix-shell for development, i simply can patch all packages, across all languages, py, js, c, ...
nixpkgs caveat: some packages are repackaged binary builds = problem of trust