Thanks for checking it out! If you'd like you can post your blog link in an issue or discussion once it's up and I'll link to it from the MultiTerm README. :)
Hi Paul, just wanted to say thanks for working so hard on Ardour. I just started playing with Ardour in Fedora on my Framework laptop, but I've been thinking about buying a M1 mac to make music because I miss Logic and Ableton. These release notes have got me hyped because now I might not want to! I'm very excited to try out the clips and freesound features. I'll definitely be buying a license soon. You (and the rest of the brilliant Ardour contributors) seriously rock!
WRT Home Manager, that makes sense and portability is definitely a cool benefit of Home Manager. But keeping all of your config for multiple workstations in one has drawbacks too. I found myself frustrated when I wanted to install something but I forgot to push changes from another computer so I needed to stash or rebase later on. Just to install a package! I only have one workstation and a small amount of servers, and I tried running NixOS on everything. It worked well (I still have multiple servers running NixOS actually) but for me, the benefits just weren't worth the overhead of living full time in Nix land. Now I use Debian stable for new servers and I prefer it. But yeah, lots of personal preference here. And WRT nix-env, it seems troubling to me that the fundamental tool of the Nix CLI is something that you recommend people stay away from. I think you may have be right about that recommendation, but I think it shows that Nix as a product is far off from being a "pick up and run" tool for average developers. I really hope that it will somehow get to that point but, like the author says, I don't think it will be Nix itself because it has burrowed itself into a bespoke, complicated UX that has a huge learning curve. I like simple things with elegant UX so that's where I'm coming from. There's just so many ways to use Nix, like, TOO many ways. But I'm glad that they're pioneering this space.
I used Nix and NixOS for more than a year as my daily driver. I've contributed to Nixpkgs. I agree with the author on most if not all of their points. Here's some advice: If you're interested in Nix, take steps not leaps. Use the Nix package manager. It's a great addition to distros like Debian. Then maybe use Home Manager (even though I think Home Manager is way over-hyped, see below). Then write a bunch of derivations. Then go learn the ins and outs of systemd. THEN go play with NixOS. If you skip any steps before the NixOS part, you will get lost in the weeds. The happy path of NixOS is very happy. The other paths are very challenging. You should really know a lot about both Nix and more traditional Linux packaging methods before you go all in on NixOS. And honestly, learning more traditional Linux utilities is a far better use of your time than learning the complex, ever-changing Nix landscape. It's a super cool project, I'm so glad it exists. But it should really be viewed as a _research_ project. Many good things will come out of it. Hopefully one of those things (like the author mentions) is a Nix clone written in a common language with a much better UX. Until then, try to avoid the urge to play with shiny things and stick to just using the Nix package manager and more traditional tooling.
And about Home Manager, the reason why I think it's over-hyped is because it provides a declarative approach to something that was... already declarative. Your $XDG_CONFIG directory does not need a leaky Nix abstraction on top of it. It actually just makes everything 10x harder. The Home Manager Nix abstractions are terrible but people seem to love it? Why would I write my i3 config in Nix?? An i3 config literally cannot get any simpler. Why make it more complicated for no benefit? I also don't need a declarative list of all installed packages. I'd rather just use `nix-env` personally.
Doesn’t every declarative tool require some new learned syntax? The Nix language is pretty damn good at configuration IMO. It is significantly less complex than python, for example.
Lol emacs is honestly too complex for me to dive into. I like vim because it’s simpler! I seriously value simplicity. And wanting to stay on whatever works for you, that’s totally fair. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The beauty of NixOS is that makes all the package management and configuration completely declarative and versioned. And includes a huge amount of options that abstract away complex Linux tooling, making things “just work” for 99% of use cases.
My config isn’t open-source just because it’s pretty personal information. You would be able to see every database in my local Postgres instance for example. And every one of my servers. But I do plan on making a open-source version as an example soon. And some blog posts. On twitter I’m https://twitter.com/stelstuff. The blog posts will be on https://stel.codes. GitHub I’m https://github.com/stelcodes
Yes definitely good for one computer! And I really think that NixOS is simpler than Ubuntu but there are many different ways of setting up your configuration repo and that is difficult for beginners. The way I do NixOS is very simple. And I really want to make a comprehensive guide on how to do it my way because it’s so nice! But I had to wrestle with it for many months to get to where I’m at with my config repo.
I agree that there is a large learning curve. It certainly took me a many months to get a good configuration repo going. But I see this as a failure of documentation rather than a failure of NixOS. The way I have my config setup is really not complicated, but it took so long to figure out the design. I really want to write a blog post series about how I do NixOS because I highly value simplicity and I think there are too many NixOS “learning” resources that are written by and for highly technical NixOS gurus. NixPills is a prime example of this. That blog post series is NOT for beginners. At all. But somehow is referenced as a learning resource.
Valid points. I definitely wouldn’t use NixOS on embedded. About contributing, You don’t really need to be on the unstable channel completely. I use a mix of stable and unstable packages. It’s not hard to do but it’s also not super intuitive either. And about home directories, I don’t use Home Manager either. I find that it introduced too much complexity and I don’t actually like it all that much. What I do is globally install all my packages and put configuration files in /etc. if the programs don’t have an /etc location to look for, I just create a symlink to config file in my home directory. That way all my config files are in my nixos-config repo.
I want to write a blog post about my way of setting up NixOS. There are many ways to go about it and I feel like mine prioritizes simplicity and doesn’t use complex Nix techniques, so it may be very helpful for beginners.
It doesn’t matter which distro you use… unless it’s NixOS. Declarative operating systems are the future. NixOS is incredible. My whole configuration is a git repo. My servers have the exact same neovim/tmux/zsh config as my laptop. Switching between desktop environments couldn’t be easier. Messed up your system? Simply choose a previous generation on the boot screen. Seriously, try NixOS.