nixpkgs
nixos-hardware
nixpkgs | nixos-hardware | |
---|---|---|
979 | 69 | |
16,249 | 1,684 | |
3.6% | 7.7% | |
10.0 | 9.6 | |
3 days ago | about 22 hours ago | |
Nix | Nix | |
MIT License | Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal |
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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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,
```
- NixOS/nixpkgs: There isn't a clear canonical way to refer to a specific package
nixos-hardware
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Microsoft Is Driving Users Away
Always useful to look at the seemingly endless stream of Linux information, the Arch wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_ROG_Zephyrus_G14_(2022...
Also NixOS has a nixos-hardware repository with configurations for some laptops:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/asus/zep...
Reasonably legible if you ever programmed anything
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Unable to start ROG Control Center
{ imports = [ # Include the results of the hardware scan. ./hardware-configuration.nix # Additional hardware specific configuration # https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware ];
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NixOS Unstable - Nvidia - Hyprland
You could try this repo for hardware support on various laptops if yours is on it: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
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macOS Sonoma Broke Grep
https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
- NixOS on Hyper-V (Win11)
- System crashes when Fn+f5/6/7/8/9 is pressed.
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A couple nooby questions
Btw, for starters, I think you can learn a lot by checking other's configurations and from things like https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware. There are a lot of useful/essential configurations that are not enabled by default.
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Setup -Advice or another attempt to dive deep
in that case do note that this module assumes you use nixos-hardware, otherwise you can remove lines 161-165. I can also send you my VM's libvirtd .xml file when you get around to creating it.
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Xorg fails to start with the modesetting driver
My computer is a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with a dual GPU setup (AMD iGPU + Nvidia DGPU) where I'm using a "hybrid mode" configuration provided by nixos-hardware, using PRIME offload.
Not too long ago nixos-hardware changed the default Xorg driver for AMD to modesetting from amdgpu.
What are some alternatives?
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
rtw89 - Driver for Realtek 8852AE, an 802.11ax device
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
USB-WiFi - USB WiFi Adapter Information for Linux
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
nix-gui - Use NixOS Without Coding
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
nonguix
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.
rnix-lsp - WIP Language Server for Nix! [maintainer=@aaronjanse]