That ks for sharing this, this is fascinating.

Maybe the underlying rule is: the more you know about something, the more you are aware of its flaws, making the alternatives you know less about more attractive?

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language.

nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos.

Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.

Ah, sorry. https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Just gonna leave this here

rmpc is great. But TUI, so not for everyone, I know.

Real travel videos for niche places are so annoying to find now.

I’ve really been enjoying https://youtube.com/@ririregine

I mean, how can we feel superior if we are not wasting huge amounts of time setting things up!?

Why, by boasting that it’s so easy, just look at that, it is only two options you need to set thanks to the 80 custom modules I’ve written to abstract the abstractions from nixpkgs!

I WISH I could put an /s here, but I cannot.

Ehm… I’m also on Nixos and I’d say it’s super trivial.

services.openssh = {
  enable = true;
  settings = {
    PasswordAuthentication = false;
    PermitRootLogin = "no";
  };
};

users.users.<name>.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [ list of pubkeys ideally read from file in repo ];

Eh, the machine is actually in one of my wireguard nets anyways, but for different purposes.

The nice thing about SSH key-based access is, I either have the key and login succeeds, or I have no business trying to log in.

That’s why my remote root server bans via fail2ban after a single failed login.

Yes I’ve had to write support to get a KVM. Yes it’s still configured like this.

LLMs will never be conscious.

Past me had a dick

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Or TUI.

Nice, I was able to send an email to that.

No-one is forcing you to install Adobe software. Stop crying about other people liking choices.

You misunderstand! It has also turned into basically a hobby (and recently, a job, lol) to manage nix configs.

Those 19k lines are clean, well-structured and DRY, and do describe every little thing about ca. 30 machines.

maniacally laughs while trying to avoid eye contact with 19k lines of nix config

Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.

In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.

For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.

Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.

With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:

• all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
• my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
• creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…