Why I love NixOS is really about the Nix package manager, reproducibility, and sane system management in the LLM coding era.
  • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
    18·
    24 days ago

    I recently built a voice-to-text agent in Rust

    Agent…? Uh, okay, let’s just use that word for everything now.

    I did not have the Rust toolchain installed on my system. I simply told the coding agent that I use Nix, and it figured out how to pull in the entire Rust toolchain through Nix, compile the project inside an isolated shell and produce a working binary.

    Sorry, where is the part where you built something?

    Anyway, NixOS gets a lot of praise. Maybe it’s something I should try if Manjaro doesn’t survive its current drama (though it seems like they have a path forward now).

    • lmr0x61@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      24 days ago

      Yeah, that paragraph is where I stopped reading lol

      Blog post aside, NixOS is fantastic. Once you get the Nix DSL down, it makes everything so smooth once you know how to configure your system. The learning curve for me came not from the packages, but learning how to set up system/program configurations using configuration.nix, instead of the standard config files. But once you get that down, you can rebuild essentially the exact same system from a single file. I use it for my worker nodes on my server cluster, and it makes setup of new nodes a dream. Definitely recommend.

    • NostraDavid@programming.dev
      4·
      24 days ago

      I’ve been using NixOS for a year now, and I did use LLMs to set up a large part of my configuration: It’s absolute amazing being able to share 1 configuration between multiple machines.

      I also added a Justfile to hold a bunch of common commands, so I can never forget them :D

      Just start out by throwing your hardware-configuration.nix and configuration.nix (from /etc/nix/configuration, IIRC) into a repo, and sudo nixos-rebuild switch as starting command (in that repo).

      Also yes, each host will need its own hardware-configuration, but they can share a configuration.nix (to some extent), but just start by adding a list of programs from https://search.nixos.org/packages, oh and @vimjoyer IS the documentation.

    • Lucy :3@feddit.org
      3·
      23 days ago

      When installing a package is too hard, one simply should not use a PC. Maybe the nursing home would be a better place.