nixpkgs | nix-gui | |
---|---|---|
980 | 29 | |
16,249 | 645 | |
3.6% | 1.1% | |
10.0 | 0.0 | |
4 days ago | almost 2 years ago | |
Nix | Python | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
nixpkgs
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I've compared nearly all Rust crates.io crates to contents of their Git repos
That's what nixpkgs does for Nix/NixOS. The package set is continuously built by a CI system and made publicly available: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs#continuous-integration-and-...
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Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager
Agreed. NixOS is a marvel of engineering to me, and kind of hard to go back from once you get used to it. Automatic snapshotting on every configuration change, the entire system state being configurable through text files and therefore never being ambiguous, being able to temporarily install stuff without it polluting your path for forever by using nix-shells, clearly being able to see and define stuff like boot parameters and kernel modules are just insanely wonderful things, all while still using (I think) a vanilla kernel and really no runtime overhead, allowing you to make an insanely lean system without ever being unsure if you're missing something. In my mind about as close to an "objectively better" way to handle an OS (at least for people who are technical). I have no desire to go back to any other distro for my server.
But the Nix language itself is really quite annoying. I mean, I've more or less gotten used to its annoyances, and I do think that some of the DSLs it has are excellent (I really like the Nginx and systemd configuration stuff, for example), and a lot of the configs are just `services.myservice.enable = true` which is fine, but a lot of the time I'm kind of confused about what syntax is allowed and how loops work and the like. It's not horrible or anything, just a bit annoying because I'll occasionally have to do a nixos-rebuild like three or four times because I messed up some subtle syntax, and it's especially annoying if I have to go dig at the root Nix package to find out what I did wrong [1].
I think decentralizing stuff in the form of flakes might be able to help with this, if for no other reason the area in which you'd be forced to look for configuration stuff could be reduced, but I do think NixOS would benefit from some rearchitecture.
[1] Which happened yesterday with an ethernet card configuration: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.05/nixos/modu...
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Linux virtual machines, with a focus on running containers
I agree NixOS + docker/podman-compose is a good compromise but one has to be aware NixOS still run podman as root (1) [0]. What is very scary and defeat the purpose of rootless container.
- [0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/259770
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Enlightenmentware
I don't think there's a right way to do it, you are correct in that learning NixOS is pretty tedious.
Re: flakes, my personal opinion is to use flakes. While Flakes are imperfect, they still provide a lot of functionality that Nix doesn't otherwise have. In my mind, it's like Nix's equivalent of "Go modules" or something like that. I do feel like people who do not like flakes make many valid points (the boilerplate, the fact that the top-level flake expression is a subset of Nix for some reason, etc.) but the argument isn't that those problems shouldn't be solved, it's that flakes are a sub-optimal design. Since they're so proliferated throughout the ecosystem though, it is quite unlikely that Nix or any prominent fork will outright drop flakes support any time in the near future. For better or worse, Flakes are part of the Nix ecosystem for the foreseeable future. In my opinion, one may as well take advantage of that.
If you haven't already, I'd get your feet wet with installing Nix on a non-NixOS machine first, and please feel free to ask questions about Nix in the NixOS Discourse "Help" section.
I have some recommendations:
1. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv - Since Nix derivations usually wrap around other build systems, the entire derivation is recomputed when any file in it changes; using direnv, you can just get your normal dev tools upon cd'ing into your project directories. This gives you a lot of the benefits of Nix during local development, but with your normal stack, and without needing to globally install anything.
2. If you are trying to build something, chances are you can find inspiration in Nixpkgs. Are you curious how you might package a Bevy game? No problem: literally search "bevy" on the Nixpkgs GitHub repo and see what comes up. I found a derivation that does: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/jump...
3. If you use flakes, you should keep the flake "schema" handy. There are a lot of different kinds of flake outputs and there are different ways to specify the same thing, which is somewhat needlessly confusing; keeping the flake schema handy will make it easier to understand what Nix is looking for in a flake, which might make it easier to see what's going on (especially if it's obfuscated.) The most important takeaway here: A command like `nix run flake#attr` will try multiple different attributes. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/flakes#Flake_schema
4. Likewise, I really recommend reading up on what NixOS modules are. NixOS modules are the basis for configurations on NixOS, and having a clear understanding of what is even going on with them is a good idea. For example, you should understand the difference between the Nix language's `import` directive, and using the NixOS modules `imports` attribute to import other NixOS modules. Understanding how the configuration merge works saves a lot of headache, makes it easier to understand how people's configurations works, and also makes it easier to modularize your own NixOS configurations, too. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_modules
Unfortunately though, there's just no way to make it "click", and I can't guarantee that it's worth all of the effort. For me, I felt it was, but yes, there's no one correct way to do it.
But please feel free to ask questions if anything seems confusing.
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Tracexec: TUI for tracing execve and pre-exec behavior
This will drop you into a shell where `tracexec` is installed.
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/310158
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Nix: The Breaking Point
I don't think so. The article is probably intended for the Nix community, so the author doesn't need to convince HN that something is going on. If as an outsider you are interested then you need to look into it yourself, the community has no obligation to make their internal conflicts legible to the outside world.
As an outsider myself, it certainly looks like something is going on as more than 20 Nixpkg maintainers left in a week: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=label%3A%228.has%3...
- Maintainers Leaving
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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset
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Eelco Dolstra's leadership is corrosive to the Nix project
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup
For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...
For example,
```
nix-gui
- System settings that aren’t in System Settings
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AI roasts NixOS users
This is pretty close https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
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Which newer, up and coming distros do you think will make it?
Nix based aiming at beginners. If it combines/works with https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui, then an amazing distro may be created. It would be user friendly, but also extremely powerful, allowing basically everything to be configured via the gui. Both softwares are alpha state, but I am excited to see what they bring.
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Using NixOS on corporate laptops.
Maybe https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui? I dunno if it can do userspace config though.
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Nix Software Center: gtk4/libadwaita app store for NixOS
Would it make sense to integrate something like nix gui into this?
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NixOS Configuration Editor: A gtk4/libadwaita app to edit and manage basic configurations without (much) coding
I remember when I first started using NixOS, as a confused beginner I tried to find a graphical application to manage and edit my configuration. I stumbled upon Nix-Gui, however, I didn’t really like the look, it crashed a fair amount, and I never really figured out how to use it. That said, their idea and all of the hard work they put into their project inspired me to make a similar application that focuses more on simplicity and ease of use.
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NIX GUI application to manage nixos build with graphical ui.
I was wondering if you are aware of https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui and how your tool compares to it
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Is flatpak really the future?
There is also a GUI in development, hopefully it will help casual users in the future.
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How do I contribute to NixOS?
There's https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui for a gui like experience.
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NixOS History and Our Experience - Nix, Null, Nada, Nothing
Configuration language usage: Probably a major win for programmers, but a major negative for non-programmers. However, nix-gui has shown that there's potential for gui-based nixos configuration. And this might one day be extended to use as part of the graphical installer. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-is-there-no-installer-for-nixos/16644/21. Since nix can be serialized and deserialized to json, there's actually a fair amount of interoperability able to be done to manipulate nix configuration using existing libraries.
What are some alternatives?
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
flatpak - Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk - Gtk implementation of xdg-desktop-portal
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
nixos-hardware - A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks.
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
dhall-lang - Maintainable configuration files
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
nonguix - Nonguix mirror – pull requests ignored, please use upstream for that
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.
nickel - Better configuration for less