Answering that question fully would require a PHD thesis.
Perhaps you could narrow down your question a little?
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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What about Nix's financial issues? Have they been resolved yet?
To get it out of the way first: There are no financial issues. There are more than enough funds to continue operations as they are for a sufficiently long time.
What is actually happening is that a long time sponsor has indicated that they (understandably) no longer want to foot the huge bill of hosting the entire archive of binary caches ($9000/mo). Finding a more sustainable setup is what the community is currently concerned with.
There is no risk of operations shutting down any time soon, the NixOS foundation has funds set aside to continue even this unsustainable setup for at least a year. We just want to be more efficient with our and others resources going forwards.
That's what all this you might have heard of is about.
Btw, even if the binary cache were to go poof, we don't technically need it. NixOS is a source-based distro like Gentoo and source hosting is not a concern. The binary cache is immensely helpful though which is why we'd obviously prefer to keep it.
I think AWS Gave them 12 months of free credit to host cache
Yes, AWS gracefully sponsored 12 months of our S3 bill which gives us even more time to enact change.
That's just the short term resolution though, the Nix community is still looking into more sustainable long-term solutions.
$9,000/mo? Have you considered not using the most ridiculously expensive method possible?
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I'm using Void Linux and see no reason to move over to NixOS. The concept seems cool though.
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I didn't get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it's different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY
People love Nix because of the OS configuration based around a single config file. Essentially, you define your system configuration in this file, including installed programs, then you rebuild your system based on that configuration.
The beauty here is that you can easily move this file to another machine running NixOS and reproduce your configuration there. You can also roll back changes by simply rebooting and choosing the last known good build and you're back in business.
I don't get the hype. I'm staying with Arch, as Nix seems to be mainly for developers.
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Overlays. Good package management, and lot of stability stuff.
I tried it about a year ago and I don't know it did not convince me. Yeah it might be great for some niche developer oriented needs or deployment but for a normal OS usage, meh. I kind of see it as a current hype, just like crypto/NFT before, and AI now. For normal everyday usage I find openSUSE Tumblweed much more suitable and much more widely applicable.
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because it's good as hell and i don't want to have to spend time having to rebuild and reconfigure fresh OS installs or risk breakage when I could just use a config file that I know already works
All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.
I like using btrfs with Arch because of the snapshots. If an update breaks something I can just boot into a snapshot from grub keep using my PC and solve the problem later. It's very useful... yes... very... you should try it... come... try btrfs... it's warm and cozy... INSTALL IT!
I have tried btrfs in the past and when it goes wrong you are utterly shafted. You can't even mount it as a read only file system, it will just lock you out entirely. And the support isn't great, I ended up finding something that had a disclaimer along the lines of "only run this if you really know what you're doing", but obviously I didn't as the documentation didn't tell me enough to know. So the only people who could possibly know are the developers of the file system themselves. Anyway, I was 2 days in to trying to recover my data by this point so I gave it a go, nothing to lose - it refused to do anything. Great.
So in summary I'm not going to try it again.
can confirm, I've recently had my btrfs partition on NixOS go permanently read-only because it ran out of metadata space (which you can't extend without write access, even though btrfs does reserve 0.5GB of metadata space) so I've switched to bcachefs
Hmm, I've never heard of NixOS. Is it suppose to be like blendOS or CurtainOS? A blend of different desktop environments?
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I switched around one and a half years ago. I must say, there are some hurdles to using NixOS. Mainly I dislike that it always takes around 20 times the effort to start and project. You make up for the initial time investment, because you end up with a far more stable setup, but still it does take some willpower to get things started.
I've been looking at it after numerous times I update Fedora only to have some tool break that I use daily. Then I spend a chunk of the day getting Virtualbox working again so I can do my job (write code for websites).
I haven't made the jump, but it looks very interesting.
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