Try Brilliant free for 30 days https://brilliant.org/fireship You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Nix is a purely functional package mana...
it’s replicable and “atomic”, which for a well-designed modern package manager shouldn’t be that noticable of a difference, but when it’s applied to an operating system a la nixos, you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages. And backup the system state with only a few dozen kilobytes of config files instead of having to backup the entire hard drive (well, assuming the online infrastructure needed to build it in the first place continues to work as expected), and probably rollback a bad change much easier
you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages.
As can you with grepping your history of apt commands? And back up that to a file of a few dozen kilobytes too.
assuming you have never used anything except apt commands to change the state of your system. (and are fine with doings superfluous changes eg. apt install foo && apt remove foo)
Maybe that’s what I’m missing then. So with NIX, I need to make all config changes through it? I can’t change any config files myself? Or start a program with a certain flag?
with nixos, the states of all the config files are collected into the nix configuration which you can modify manually. And if there’s something that can’t be handled through that, I think the common solution is to isolate the “dirty” environment into a vm or some other sort of container that I think comes with nixos
(and there’s always going to be “data” which isn’t part of the “configuration” … which can just be used as a configuration for individual applications)
it’s replicable and “atomic”, which for a well-designed modern package manager shouldn’t be that noticable of a difference, but when it’s applied to an operating system a la nixos, you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages. And backup the system state with only a few dozen kilobytes of config files instead of having to backup the entire hard drive (well, assuming the online infrastructure needed to build it in the first place continues to work as expected), and probably rollback a bad change much easier
As can you with grepping your history of apt commands? And back up that to a file of a few dozen kilobytes too.
Am I stupid?
assuming you have never used anything except apt commands to change the state of your system. (and are fine with doings superfluous changes eg. apt install foo && apt remove foo)
Maybe that’s what I’m missing then. So with NIX, I need to make all config changes through it? I can’t change any config files myself? Or start a program with a certain flag?
with nixos, the states of all the config files are collected into the nix configuration which you can modify manually. And if there’s something that can’t be handled through that, I think the common solution is to isolate the “dirty” environment into a vm or some other sort of container that I think comes with nixos
(and there’s always going to be “data” which isn’t part of the “configuration” … which can just be used as a configuration for individual applications)
Okay now that’s cool. Now I’m getting it.
I guess that happens even if you install nix in another OS?