It certainly can, but I don’t believe it is feasible until some stabilization happens.
We are still struggling with some corners around flakes, Nix (it is still considered slow), Nixpkgs (we are still discussing how to rework the tree), even NixOS itself.
Just do a rg --count-matches "mk\(Removed\|Renamed\)OptionModule" nixpkgs/nixos and you will find how many files use backwards-compatible constructions.
I myself suggested to move networkManager to services. After all, connman was moved before. However, when I tried, I have found a huge block of bugs.
Also, there are many complex packages around Nixpkgs itself. How exactly should we provide Emacs packages or vim/vscode plugins for a non-root user?
I still believe the most successful path is to leverage a third party distro (and maybe phagocyte it).
It may sound naive, but I’m talking about the group that could choose a laptop with NixOS preinstalled and have the same level of complexity in installing/administering the system as Ubuntu/Fedora.
Here I agree
Perhaps you are right.
But in general, as a user with the label Great contributor, you personally see, for example, the supply of laptops or some PCs with NixOS on an equal footing with other distributions in the future (let’s assume that legal/secure boot issues will be resolved, suppliers will be interested, and all the current problems of Nix(OS) that you listed, solved)?
I do not think NixOS is hard to use, if you have good documentation. And that is where my point is. I tried to install hplipWithPlugin and it failed miserably.Always, whatever I tried, syntax error. And the wiki does not provide info how to deal with this. The thing is, the wiki is writen for advanced users, those are users who are not advanced at all, but who are willing to spent days figuring out what is the solution. But solutions have to be found in the Handbook or the wiki. Not on some sort of obscure website. So please stop being “academic”, and start being “human”. Write docs that can be understood by “non-geeks”, also known as “users”. After all, an OS is made to be used. Hopefully by all people.
Yes, documentation is lacking. The problem is indeed, that it is written by folks that know what they do, and the wiki is written by those who either knew what they did, or by those who accidentally made something work and did not draw the correct conclusion.
On top of that, the wiki is quite often simply outdated…
Those who wrote the “I know what I was doing” stuff though are not skilled doc writers, they are skilled nix users.
And no-one tells the skilled doc-writers where the urgent problems are, so they fix what they are aware of, on a best effort basis.
When you have problems with the docs, create an issue, ask here, but do not come and say “I tried to install X years ago but there was lacking docs about it” in a completely different topic.
I am not on the anglophone, North Hemisphere side of the globe. I am far from being of help here.
Here where I live a random user have the following options:
buy a laptop (or for that matter a desktop PC) from general-purpose appliance retailers
with preinstalled MS-Windows™
a long time ago some low quality laptops were assembled at the Free Trade Zone, and as part of the requirements an obscure Linux distro (Linpus, IIRC). It was a bad experience…
build a PC by buying pieces from specialized retailers
here you are way more free to install your own OS
but it doesn’t mean a great deal - you can overwrite any previous Windows installation, after all…
Nixos documentation could literally be colour coded, like ski runs.
Beginners need very basic instructions - that’s all.
If I read something in red, say, then I would know that it involves pretty advanced concepts requiring a pretty good understanding of functional programming etc.
I personally just want instructions in green. I want to use Nixos because it has so much to offer, but I am an IT beginner and I simply am incapable of parsing too much complexity right now.
Having worked on Nix-related documentation for almost a year as my day job all I can add to the discussion is this:
all documentation can be made easy to understand if you make knowledge dependencies explicit and only use those you declare
doing that takes a lot of time and effort, and it already begins with finding the leaf items (core concepts) to explain
we desperately need a maintainer (i.e. lead editor) for NixOS documentation
Please feel free to step up and join the documentation team. I’ll do everything in my capacity to support you.
Personal opinion from first-hand experience: Ideally bring funding to work on the subject at least part-time for at least half a year. Anything else is probably going to stall or evaporate.
The great vantage is that, in a certain sense, Nix allows to configure the whole system using an uniform language. This is way better than to learn a hundred different configuration styles for a thousand different packages with intricate interactions.
Just do an internet search for LAMP or LTSP.
In this sense, NixOS is a perfect backend for a SnowflakeOS.
The only problem is that someone needs to write the plumbing - and it resumes to more NixOS modules!
Some ramblings tonight while trying to work out a number of issues that remind me of “user friendly”. They might sound a rant - but I am positive we can fix it, and keep promoting Nixos.
Summary - I think we need to be more cautious about the benefits, but reinforce the path is worth it!
Better delineation of nix and nixos - it is far too easy to find a “help” that refers to the other side and doesn’t work for you
Up to date documentation - the number of times I have found something that should work (and did just 6 months ago) but doesn’t anymore…at least we need a mapping to “if you found x, try y”
Flakes and home manager. It took me literally weeks to get a flake working that allows HM. And I still can’t find how to install “non-free” correctly! At least a guide that would steer those like me who will “get serious” to avoid the initial approach and jump straight to flakes would save angst trying to convert!
“Passing the buck”. There is a lot of “it is really hard” stuff out there - my example is home-assistant where the wiki gives me an error and the only suggestion is to “ask the matrix group” (I have yet to find out how to do that in Nixos!). This approach makes Nixos appear unfriendly (and I am not blaming any users on the forum at all - just highlighting external perception).
Reproducible. A lot is made of consistency and rollback. However, boot configs can easily break a system (I have done it several times), and nix is not a total panacea - I use folding at home and for my first 90 or so iterations of my system it wouldn’t work. Then it did for about 30-40 iterations. Now it doesn’t again. I documented my “fix” in the forum, and I haven’t deviated from that, but something has happened. I have the same app on 4 architectures - 3 don’t work with the GPU, and 1 does (in theory the hardest?!). Debug is really hard! I think that dragon warnings are required.
The nix language seems very complicated to me at times. I often can’t look at two options and see how they differ, and hence why I should choose one or the other. As a result, the error are often impenetrable.
Finally - happy to try and help…so if anyone has suggestions where I can contribute let me know!
Hello! Creator of SnowflakeOS here. From experience, I’ve found that the main difficulty in making a user-friendly interface for NixOS is many different ways someone can structure their configuration. This is part of the reason I decided to make SnowflakeOS instead of just a series of add-ons to NixOS, it allows me to make opinionated and predictable choices in how everything is configured.
I feel like this is even more relevant to NixOS than any other distro given how many different ways you can manage and configure it.
I think it can be in time, at least out of the box, but given what I mentioned above about endless ways to configure everything, I feel like it’d be pretty hard to support all possible configuration formats, and would add additional burden to the NixOS team. However I do plan on making Nix Software Center and NixOS Configuration Editor available in nixpkgs once stabilized. So theoretically once that happens a new used could just add nix-software-center to their environment.systemPackages and be able to use it pretty easily.
But overall the goals I have for SnowflakeOS are to:
Show that a user-friendly NixOS based distro is not only possible, but also works well
Create tooling for creating other NixOS based distros
Create user friendly tools for all NixOS users (Like the software center and configuration editor)
The Calamares Installer feels, to me, like a shuttle service to a space lab where a bunch of scientists have been floating around in suspended animation conducting esoteric experiments for a long time.
The only way Nixos might work for me is if every 6 months HQ provided a few templates for action and I go on a Linode and go though them, monkey see monkey do. By following one at a time one of the multiple Byzantine options for configuration I could at least see at least a plumbing in action, which would expand my mind, for sure.
You can not define it any better anymore… There is a clear boundary.
nix is the tool and language.
“nixOS” is the linux distribution that uses the nix expression language and the nix build tool to manage itself.
There are even 3 seperate manuals for Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS.
I have to agree though that some inofficial ressources are mixing Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs’ responsibilities and are very sloppy with the naming.
I have never had that problem in the official documentation. If this happened to you with the official documentation please point out the location, that is something the doc-team needs to be aware of!
Then please open a thread here. Though, HM is not NixOS, nor is it an official extension. It is a community project.
Thanks @AndersonTorres and @NobbZ for positive replies to my grumpy post (wasn’t meant to be but I seem to be collecting issues faster than I can whack down!).
I’ve probably been to quick to find the answer rather than re-read the official docs, so I will try better…and I’m not really a programmer and find nix hard which doesn’t help.
I’ll create a thread regarding HM - I’ve only very recently got flakes working, and I want to document what I have tried with HM. I prefer to create a post that helps document better what I have tried rather than just “this is the magic line to put in configuration.nix”.
However, have you considered making these utilities so that they follow the “standard”configuration.nix hierarchy and if something unusual is detected (e.g. files are connected differently somehow or a parameter has completely different values) give warnings that the utility may/will not work correctly?
I mean, newbies are unlikely to do anything unusual at first.
And if, after a while, they want to complicate their configuration, they will have already mastered the terminal and they are unlikely to need graphical configurators.
Cool thing is, they already do! I try to support as many configurations as possible, so there are options to define your config locations, with the default checking /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.
I think by “standard” he means the default configuration structure set up when you first install NixOS. So no flakes, two nix files /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix. But even though this is the default, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily best practice, just a good starting point.
Understood! So I am already beyond that using flakes…
Thx
In terms of best practice, some guidelines would be useful for those getting deeper into configuration.
My OCD makes me ponder if all my desktop config elements such be in “desktop.nix”, but I also want all services in “services.nix” (I know - my choice).
I would have appreciated some guide rails or a discussion of some of the implication of those choices.
