Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.

caveats are you’ve got to use:

• home-manager to generate your dotfiles.
• something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.

But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME> Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.

I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.

Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.

There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.

As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.

Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.

• Lisp is responsible for most of the parts of programming widely considered enjoyable.

• Fortran is still often used in some of our most performant libraries.

• POSIX shell was one of the most important parts of unix-like systems becoming how they are today, and it’s compatibility is still an invaluable glue for tying programs written in the 90’s to programs written today.

Statically linking is absolutely a tool we should use far more often, and one we should get better at supporting.

It feels like no matter where I move to, a communist seems to move in at the exact same time… It’s uncanny.

Tailscale edits /etc/resolv.conf, since your DNS isn’t working start by making sure that file is how the archwiki suggests rather than what tailscale changes it to.

An uninstalled tailscale may still have left that file modified.

The specifics matter, but generally no.

When an actual fraud investigation is being done into something major like a casino laundering money, my government tends not to turn it into a media circus until after investigations are underway.

When a politician tells me they want to ‘tackle fraud’, especially welfare fraud, I hear “I want to arrest people for being poor”. It sounds like a dog-whistle to me, because every time I hear it used, it’s by people bearing a “the cruelty is the point” mindset.

I wish.

It was a bcachefs array with data replicas being a mix of 1,2 & 4 depending on what was most important, but thankfully I had the foresight to set metadata to be mirrored for all 4 drives.

I didn’t get the good fortune of only having to do a resilver, but all I really had to do was fsck to remove references to non-existent nodes until the system would mount read-only, then back it up and rebuild it.

NixOS did save my bacon re: being able to get back to work on the same system by morning.

A few months ago I accidentally dd’d ~3GiB to the beginning of one of the drives in a 4 drive array… That was fun to rebuild.

It seems a lot of new developers want to do some things differently; old guard devs can either make some compromises, or accept that fewer new devs will want to be part of upstream.

Dunno man, when what the dev of 30+ years said was more or less “fuck off”, it seems that advice was in fact heeded

It’s a chicken and egg problem; manufacturers aren’t going to care to upstream drivers if not enough of their users are on Linux, which slows new hardware. It’s much better than it was, but still ongoing.

Amd’s 7000 series amdgpu driver was busted in several ways for like a year post launch, and is still missing tunables for many GPU features.

Manufacturers are capable of making out of tree and unfree modules, but honestly I prefer the slow progress if it means most driver work stays in-tree.

Either Linus or Greg K-H, likely after feedback from many others.

We should be looking at his given reasons, not making assumptions based on some ineffable set of considerations that he might have.

Christof’s given reason of complexity is sensible, it’s also one already considered when allowing R4L in the first place; adding rust language support has been deemed worth the additional complexity.

~/.config is probably a poor comparison on my part; it’s management is actually done by home-manager rather than Nixos proper, and I can’t think of another OS that fills this same role.

Nixos generates (for example) /etc/systemd/network to a path in /nix/store and symlinks it to it’s appropriate locations. After the files are generated the appropriate /nix/store paths are (re-mounted? Over-mounted? I’m not sure the implementation) made read-only (by default), but anything that isn’t generated is absolutely both mutable and untracked, and that “not tracking everything in /etc” is more what I’m going on about.

If you use Nixos as intended (when you find that a package is lacking a config option you want, create your own nix option internally) the distro is effectively immutable, but if you use Nixos for anything moderately complex that changes frequently e.g. a desktop os, you eventually run into the choice: become competent enough to basically be a nixpkgs contributor, or abandon absolute immutability.

I think the first option is worth it, and did go down that route, but it is unreasonable to expect the average Linux consumer to do so, and so something like fedora atomic is going to remain more “immutable” for them than nixos.

This need to git gud is thankfully lessening with every commit to nixpkgs, and most people can already get to most places without writing their own set of nix options or learning how to parse //random markup language// into nix, but you’ll eventually run into the barrier.

I’d argue it’s closer to a mutable distro than an immutable one.

Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.

You can build an ‘immutable’ environment on nix, but rather than storing changes as transactions like rpm-ostree, it’ll modify path in /nix/store and symlink it. Sure, you can store the internal representation of those changes in a git repo, but that is not the same thing as the changes themselves; if the nixpkgs implementation of a config option changes, the translation on your machine does too.

Is that why they prevented it from being open sourced? I thought I read a while back that they just wanted to keep the code in-house.