Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by siraben 1922 days ago
> I can't believe this worked. Sure, you won't be deploying this in production, but we mostly survived this long with unconfined apps and having transactional updates is an improvement

The resulting system still seems very mutable to me, since it appears the system configuration management isn't tracked in a transactional manner. I would think for a "immutable Linux desktop", NixOS would be what the author was looking for, since the whole system is declaratively specified and can be rolled back to any previous generation. But some users go even further, performing a ZFS rollback on every NixOS boot[0] to ensure that mutable state doesn't accumulate (NixOS only needs /boot and /nix to boot, and creates /etc /var etc. if they don't exist already).

[0] https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings
2 comments
jcastro 1922 days ago
Blog author here, indeed I like NixOS, but I don't have the time to generate an entire nix file for a working desktop. I have some friends that do it and that's great, but there's no "Get you 90% there" installation option afaict. I just don't have the time for that.

That being said I use nix on my systems, just as a package manager to some existing boxes.

link
siraben 1922 days ago
The default configuration.nix created by the NixOS installer[0] is a KDE environment already, and it's relatively simple to expand and iterate your system configuration (no restart required!). Personally for me the hardest part was figuring out partitioning (since I rarely do that), but YMMV. Hope you try it sometime!

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/77297a7519b3d968f32abd...

link
jcastro 1922 days ago
Yeah, I would love to see a repo with more example configs, for example "This one looks like Ubuntu, this one is more XFCE focused, here's a tiling wm one." and so on.
link
pknopf 1922 days ago
If you are more comfortable with apt/Ubuntu/Debian, you could use Darch: https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes

There are also base images for Arch and Void.

link
pknopf 1922 days ago
Checkout my pet project, Darch: https://godarch.com/

It is truly immutable. Here are my recipes: https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes

link