Should I use nix os?

29

This should be a sponsored project IMO. A (well) working installer is the first step if you want user adoption of your OS to a wider audience.

I wonder if the NixOS foundation is more looking for Nix adoption or NixOS.

2 Likes
30

I’m opposed to this, we need “runtime” tooling first that reliably helps the user to manage their system.

Managing the running system is a continous process, installing happens rarely.

It doesn’t help with adoption if installing is done in 3 clicks and a reboot, when after that you can’t even replace nano with emacs or neovim without reading a 200 pages theis and a thousand pages manual.

In the last year or so since the installer is available, I have seen a lot of users in the inofficial discord, who really dodn’t know how or where to continue, as the process simply didn’t tell them what to do with the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. Those users quite often left after after a week or so. Before the GUI installer, most users had question already during the initial installation phase and when they actually managed to get through it, they often kept the system alive for quite longer than a week.

I still see similar rations when there are users that were unable to use the GUI installer because the graphical ISOs have been incompatible with their GPU (but after install they were able to select the correct driver).

4 Likes
31

About user friendliness, I prefer to “sponsor” SnowflakeOS :slight_smile:

2 Likes
32

İ think offical installer should show your to be generated config file side by side on every step and show how changes you make in installer effect your config file(like showing diff off before after)

İ think that kind of installer can let newbeis get feel of how nixos works

İ also think offical installers goal shouldnt be install as fast as possible but be kind of tutorial of nixos

3 Likes
33

I said something similar somewhere yesterday, and I thought its been in this thread, but it obviously wasn’t…

1 Like
34

I keep on wondering why the great work on mynixos

hasn’t been put up front at the NixOS website.
mynixoshttpsttps://discourse.nixos.org/t/mynixos-flake-centric-website-for-nix-nixos-configs-v-0/17908
If you want to know about configurations you sureley need to take a look at that website imho.

35

Please DM me as i would love to see what you have documented. I personally love learning from other peoples fixes etc

1 Like
36

well said, i totally agree

37

nope, you have to manually create your uefi partitions. even documented on their nixos website. tbh, thats rather poor. also, no option to choose different fs as it only defaults to ext4. It also removes any other grub / linux os probers. Fortunately, it ignores w11.

38

There should be a nixos-generators-style “pre-installer” that manages the pre-install things before calling nixos-install. It should be managed with a Nix config like so:

{
  systems = {
    foo = {
      bootSystem = "EFI";
      rootFilesystem = "btrfs";
      configuration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
        modules = [
          ./foo/configuration.nix
        ];
      };
    };
  };
}

The NixOS gui installer can be just made up of 3 steps:

  • Generate a pre-installer config + NixOS config or the user BYOCs or brings their own config, and let the user modify the configs
  • Call the pre-installer to sort things like partitioning out
  • Call nix-install and install NixOS

Are there any Nix utilities similar to my pre-installer concept?

EDIT: Clarified things

39

Wait… Is it possible to install by generating a disk image with nixos-generators and writing that directly to the target disk?

40

There’s disko, which kind of does what you want: GitHub - nix-community/disko: Declarative disk partitioning and formatting using nix [maintainer=@Lassulus]

I don’t think this is quite GUI-point-and-click levels of easy though.

1 Like
41

Thanks, now I will try to make an easy-to-use script to wrap this tool up.

1 Like
42

I have produced a very primitive version of this install script called nixos-inserter.
I don’t think it’s ready to use though…

43

I wish the community too would be a stakeholder of NixOS adoption also. (I do not say you were not thinking of that, but I think it’s important to repeat it on public forums.)

Anyway, I think a beginner NixOS module is probably a good idea.

1 Like
44

I actually think this is nearly the opposite of the truth. It may be the first thing they encounter, but it’s not the most important thing they need. Before a graphical installer is useful, you have to have a graphically manageable OS, and we just don’t.

I think this is a common misconception people have about “growth”. What you need is not growth. What you need is the tools to support the growth that you want. Only once you have that can you focus on achieving that growth. If you get it backwards, you’re always going to be on the backfoot trying to keep up with “growth”.

5 Likes
45

what is it for? I cannot do anything without login?
(btw: it isn’t up to date, right?)

46

I mainly use MyNixOS to search for packages from nixpkgs and options of NixOS, home-manager and nix-darwin, and for that alone it’s very convenient.

Haven’t used any of the generation features yet, but they seem quite convenient.

47

Updated with version v0.1.28 now, including a feature to add arbitrary settings to flake outputs.

Without logging in you can browse content on the website, but to create flakes you need to log in.

Example user flake config: MyNixOS

The goal of the site is to make it easy to create Nix flakes (especially for beginners) by providing a structured UI to browse and use options and packages. Definitely a work-in-progress, but some people are finding it helpful. The videos on the front page should make it clear how you can use the website (they do look a bit dated since the interface has been updated after the videos were made :slight_smile: ).

48

I do wonder what the numbers look like with regard to ‘accidental’ MBR installs versus true legacy hardware…

Somewhat counterintuitively that might end up resulting in a better overall UX…

1 Like