nixos-and-flakes-book VS nixos-generators

I'll be honest, the first few times I tried using Nix I just couldn't get into. It was too complex for the benefits I was getting. But that was using Nix on another OS.

I recently switched to NixOS because I wanted what they were selling and the experience this time around was way better. Having no other option but to figure it out made me learn the essentials real quick (like an exchange program to a foreign country that speaks another language).

If you think about it, when you used Ubuntu or Fedora or RHEL for the first time, and probably for a very long time, you could get by without learning the deep intricacies of what is going on behind the scenes. The same is true with NixOS. The things you need to learn are different, but once you get a basic setup with home-manager setup you're off to the races. (Btw, I used this "book" to get started and it was great: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/)

The best part about using NixOS so far is that things just work. Setting up my graphics card was as simple setting enabled = true. Same for configuring specific audio frameworks. And I had tried many times to get Davinci Resolve working on other distros and always encountered issues leading me to need to dual-boot Windows so I could do video editing. Now I just enabled Davinci Resolve and it works! No more Windows.

If you're brand new to linux on the desktop, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you've been doing that for years, maybe try NixOS in 2024.

i'm new to nixos too, i found this

I found this guide really beginner friendly: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

their GH releases page has a PDF, if that helps you, or browsing around the .md files may help what I presume is your noscript browser, assuming that GH works with noscript anymore: https://github.com/ryan4yin/nixos-and-flakes-book/releases/d...

It would be useful if the wiki articles showed a 'last modified at' date. Articles like this [0] dominate search results, but it's not clear how outdated the info is. I

In case anyone is looking for an up-to-date NixOS guide/cookbook, I've found lots of value in this [1] resource.

[0] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/PulseAudio

[1] - https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

Those Linode instructions are about installing an OS from an installation ISO from Linode's rescue mode. -- I'd consider that more a 'plus' to Linode that you get to be able to install whatever unsupported Linux on Linode's VMs. But, of course it's not as smooth as the officially supported images.

Sibling comment mentions that NixOS provides ways to build VM images (e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators has a generator specifically for Linode).

Another option is to use nixos-infect, which will replace a Linux distribution with a NixOS distribution. https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

> At that point, I feel like all of the repeatability gains are gone. If I want to spin up a fresh server, I have to read a guide and set stuff up by hand?

Just as with ansible, "git pull to deploy". You'd keep a copy of your NixOS configuration.nix somewhere else, and would be able to apply it later.

> it really does let me just get a new VPS and deploy to it very fast

Using a tool you're familiar with to get the job done is going to be faster than learning to use a tool you're unfamiliar with.

I believe much of the use of NixOS is for hobby stuff, and for personal machines. (c.f. "In what environments do you use Nix", Development (1242) vs Home Server (845) vs Production (386) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983).

If you need to generate lxc container in NixOS then perhaps this repo might be useful: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators this article uses it https://www.thedroneely.com/posts/running-nixos-linux-containers/

You might wanna check out nix-community/nixos-generators, it’s maintained by the same dude as Disko

You can look at nixos-generators for support code that well let you take existing configs and build a variety of bootable images from them.

You should take a look at NixOS Generators, it's a flake with configs to build common formats like ISO, LXC, Docker, etc. I use that to generate an ISO with my config, specifically the packages.iso section.

I am trying to make use of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators to generate qcow2 images from a NixOs configuration. Since it will be used with Scaleway, they require an efi bootable image.

I haven't migrated machines from one vm provider to vmware, but I have provided a number of pregenerated nixos images (along the line of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators) to clients to install onto vmware (and other - hyperv, xen, qemu, physical) hosts.