
NixOS 14.12 released - iElectric2
http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2014-December/015411.html
======
arianvanp
If you're not willing to install a whole new OS, nix , the package manager of
nixos, is standalone and can be run in a single user without interferring with
system packages. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with the system. [0]

I use Nix together with ArchLinux now to set up consistent development
environments and it has been great. It's also blazingly fast because of
Hydra[1], their continious build system.

[0] [http://nixos.org/nix](http://nixos.org/nix) [1]
[http://nixos.org/hydra](http://nixos.org/hydra)

~~~
foobarqux
> can be run in a single user without interferring with system packages.

Can it? It seemed to require root to install when I last tried.

~~~
Nullabillity
The default setup requires root, but everything is does is contained to /nix
and ~/.nix* . /nix (the part that requires root) is just a cache, and you can
actually change the location to somewhere user-local in the settings. However,
this affects _all_ the package hashes, which will make Nix recompile
everything instead of reusing the prebuilt binaries from Hydra.

------
louwrentius
Many may wonder like me WTF is NixOS?

The key feature is 'declarative system configuration'. Sort of
Puppet/Chef/Ansible/CFengine build-in. Heavily oriented on DevOPs culture.

The OS allows you to test package installs without the fear of breaking the
system. You can always roll back to a previous known-good state.

~~~
rejschaap
Is it really based on devops culture? To me it always made sense to be able to
say I want to do X, Y and Z... figure it out. Even distributions that have
state-based procedural package managers could at least keep a list of things I
actually want to use. I never understood Debian doesn't provide this by
default, at the very list let me see the list of packages I explicitly
installed. If I accidently install Gnome 3 and then remove it I'm left with a
lot of useless junk everywhere bloating up my system.

PS. I know there are some really fickle and obscure commands to get the list
of explicitly installed packages

PPS. Maybe Gnome 3 isn't the best example, except that it would definitely be
an accident if I installed it.

PPPS. The useless junk floating around probably shouldn't bother me that much,
but it does.

~~~
zokier
apt-get autoremove

------
iElectric2
A list of changes:
[http://hydra.nixos.org/build/18399157/download/2/nixos/sec-r...](http://hydra.nixos.org/build/18399157/download/2/nixos/sec-
release-14.12.html)

------
zokier
While nix the package manager is obviously the main point of interest in
NixOS, could somebody who has actually used NixOS comment on other aspects of
it. How's the packaging of software, does NixOS try to follow upstream as
closely as possible, or do they push towards some other direction? Do they eg.
aim to provide some sensible default configurations or do they expect people
to do their own thing? How is the software selection in the repositories, are
there lots of packages missing or out-of-date? And so on..

~~~
Nullabillity
They tend to track upstream closely, but patch stuff to make sure it works
well with their relatively novel packaging.

Packages seem to tend to be barebones, but I'm not sure if that's intentional.
For example, Vim didn't ship with a default config file for quite a while,
contrary to even Arch.

------
davexunit
Congrats to the Nix team! A lot of new packages in this release.

See also: GNU Guix, based on Nix.
[https://gnu.org/s/guix](https://gnu.org/s/guix)

------
coding4all
This is great! Hopefully I can ditch Arch soon.

~~~
osense
Would you mind sharing your reasons for switching? I'm currently using Arch as
well and only stumbled upon NixOS thanks to this post.

~~~
Havvy
If you don't pay extra care to updating Arch, it's possible that an update
will brick your OS install requiring a fresh install. Granted, they usually
tell you on their websites when this happens along with how to not brick your
OS, but you have to be diligent to check every time.

~~~
osense
From my experience, at most that can go wrong is the update fails or similar
non-fatal issue may arise. I haven't been using Arch for very long (not more
than a year), but I never had any issues that would break the system. As you
already mentioned, they post the the necessary info on the website and even
now after the pacman database format upgrade when pacman fails it specifically
tells you to run a command to fix this. Oh and don't forget the massive wiki,
that one's a killer.

Plus I really like this whole rolling release philosophy with up-to-date
packages :)

~~~
Havvy
You can have up to date packages with NixOS too. Just have to change the
default channel.

