“If I need to write boilerplate and learn a new skill, is it really worth it?”

I do think it is, but only if you dive into what the services and modules do, or if you create some yourself. Most packages are created for mainstream distros and you will have to adapt how they work to nixos’s mode of working. In doing so, you will learn - at least I have.

I know more about systemd, kde’s configuration, bash, opengl, library paths, and more because of having to go through the pain of making it work ok nix/nixos.

It is arguably also quite valuable to see how something is done in nixos as a kind of documentation in code for how to configure other software. Where changing an option’s value in nixos kicks of a bunch of things, on other systems you have to either trust that the package has scripts to do that, or imperatively do those steps yourself.

The skills seem quite transferable to me, IMHO.

Javascript just made it very easy to add libraries. I bet you if it C++ had an ecosystem as easy to use as Javascript, it would be the wildest mess you could imagine. Someone would create a package chock full of generics that sends your credentials to a foreign server during compilation but output a completely fine binary. But making dependency management easy in C++ would kill the elitist allure to the language and we can’t have that now, can we?

That’s a meme response. I can snicker, but it really doesn’t solve anything.

Development should really happen more in containers but I hate devcontainers. It’s very VScode specific and any customizations I made to my shell and environment are wiped away. It has trouble accessing my ssh keys in the agent, and additional tools I installed…

I just wish nix/nixos had a safer solution for it. Maybe even firejail or bwrap or landlock or something.

We laugh about AI deleting all the shit, but every day there’s a new npm package ready to exfiltrate all your data, upload it to a server and encrypt your home. How do you protect yourself against that?

Sure, if you compare it to a thinkpad for 1k. M1 Macbook pros cost how much when they were released? 2.5k? 3k? Of you’re going to get reduced compilation times. But what exactly is it “paying of”? How is the calculation from time to money done?

“I can store so much stuff in my RAM, it’ll pay back in 6 months”. Such a random metric.

I learned to hate the Mac forced upon me for the time I used it, thank you very much. Fuck everything about those boots from the fruit store. Especially in a multi-architecture team, fuck macs.

That explains it, yeah. Companies of that size often aren’t open for change unless it is top down.

Good luck with the fur trapping. Not sure if there’ll be less bugs though ;)

I was told the same at multiple jobs and just asked kindly that they spend the money on a linux compatible laptop. I had arguments to back my statement up too. It worked out.

YMMV

Good luck (if you want to go down this path and haven’t become a farmer yet).

Rght? "I want something shiny to write my code on because it makes me look cool and costs a lot " is not ether sign of seniority.

What happens when the VPN stops? Are all requests then just sent through the clear web?

Not the first relationship to be destroyed by nixos 😢

How is that going to fund opensource?

It could be part of the solution. We know we can’t go on just like we did. It’s not sustainable and change should be affected inside the opensource system as well as outside.

I hope the Post Open license will be a part of the solution for this. Free commercial use of opensource should be disallowed.

Yes, but Microsoft and other US companies can do whatever they like. The NSA has never hacked into European telecommunication networks or spied on politicians. I guess, as long as the boogeyman is non-white, all is good.

I’m not sure what you want to achieve… do you want NixOS running in podman containers as a service? Do you want to have some kind of package that starts up podman with nix packages in it?

Could you provide your usecase(s)? “As a X I want to Y”. “As a X when I do Y I expect Z to happen”.

It’s just confusing to see flakes and home manager mentioned and some “backported” podman output to be desired. Individually those words make sense but together I’m lost.

Good luck convincing anybody in power of that. Any effort to move nix off of US infrastructure (or make it infrastructure agnostic) unfortunately has come from outside nix as its foundation and the community on discourse are github hard-liners. Convenience over everything.

Good luck convincing anybody in power of that. Any effort to move nix off of US infrastructure (or make it infrastructure agnostic) unfortunately has come from outside nix as its foundation and the community on discourse are github hard-liners. Convenience over everything.

I think the root would be a distributed reproducibility program. Sources should have mirrors worldwide and the expected hash of inputs would have to be provided by a group of trusted builders. I’m afraid to say it but a blockchain might actually be a viable solution for agreeing upon and storing those hashes.

If nix were input addressed, it would actually remove the need for agreement on the input hashes. That might actually be the best thing to start with, honestly. Then it won’t matter where things come from as long as the hash is right. Inputs could then be hosted anywhere.