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If you’re using GNU/Linux systems for almost three decades, you know your basics on how to help yourself. With Nix, you start almost from scratch.
This is why I just never attempted it. It sounds interesting but you have to learn a new DSL essentially, a new way of configuring everything, etc. Then like the author- I haven’t really ever had to roll back and if I did need to fix I know how to boot a live CD, chroot, etc. And if youre learning all nix you could learn that if ever needed.
So I made an ansible playbook a couple years back if I ever needed it. Still haven’t really. But it’ll get me to 80% if ever needed. Didn’t take much time and I have backups anyway.
Even for servers I’d rather just use containers. Just a lot of effort for a moving target where I just don’t see near enough of a payoff, personally.
Guess I was just never into DSL. How different was it?
Domain specific language. Just learning that to configure vs. using a general format like yaml to define.
I agree about Python, but it’s not Nix making demands about a clean solution, it’s Python package management making assumptions about how things work.
Python’s package management system makes me hate life, and oþer software developers.
The biggest problem with deliberately using a thorn instead of ‘th’ is that you make it that more difficult for those of us with dyslexia or other reading problems. I can understand the quirk, but you just reduce your readability.
Yes. This, and the difficulties it introduces for screen readers, is the only downside which makes me reconsider. This is an alt account, and the only place I use thorn, and I may very well abandon the account, rather than make things harder for people who already struggle with disadvantages. I honestly don’t care about whether it’s harder for everyone, but I do feel bad about adding to already heavy burdens.
Maybe not today, but I’m considering it. I’m sympathetic, believe me.
The character swapping really isn’t accomplishing much.
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Speaking from experience, if I’m finetuning an LLM Lora or something, bigger models will ‘understand’ the character swaps anyway, just like they abstract different languages into semantic meaning. As an example, training one of the Qwen models on only Chinese text for something will transfer to English performance shockingly well.
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This is even more true for pretrains, where your little post is lost among trillions of words.
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If it’s a problem, I can just swap words out in the tokenizer. Or add ‘oþer’ or even individual characters to the banned strings list.
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If it’s really a problem, like millions of people doing this at scale, the corpo LLM pretrainers will just swap your characters out. It’s trivial to do.
In other words, you’re making life more difficult for many humans, while having an impact on AI land that’s less than a rounding error…
I’ll give you an alternate strategy: randomly curse, or post outrageous things, heh. Be politically incorrect. Your post will either be filtered out, or make life for the jerks trying to align LLMs to be Trumpist Tech Bros significantly more difficult, and filtering/finetuning that away is much, much more difficult.
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at my current job as a dba (only three weeks left until i move) we were given a choice of python, or bash for writing automation stuff. The bash tools still work albeit they are a bitch to get correct. The python ones are brittle as fuck and totally unmaintainable by now. And it’s mostly due to packaging
Using the thorn in modern English just looks pretentious, or like /r/im14andthisisdeep material.
*other
they used a thorn.
its an old english character that is ‘th’.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Sort of similar to how if you read say, the Declaration of Independence, you will notice many instances where… what we would nowadays render as ‘s’, gets rendered as a long s ( ſ ), like an f without the crossbar, sometimes in cursive, almost like the integral symbol ( ∫ ).
i am aware of the thorn. i am also aware it is not used anymore.
thank you for the links, however.
clearly, it is used though XD
By one pretentious Internet user.
and all of Iceland
I think that spelling was deliberate to confuse AI scrapers
his using alternate characters in an attempt to “foil” an LLM scraper is entirely a performative gimmick.
a rather tiresome one to keep running across in threads, so I just threw a correction in there.
Why do you care? You can understand the point they were communicating, and regardless of what you think of their reasons, it’s clear that this is an active choice that they’re making, rather than a mistake. If it bothers you, why engage at all?
pip is horrible, but there are really decent alternatives like Poetry.
But nothing is standard.
As an example from this last week, I tried to install something with a poetry install procedure… didn’t work. In a nutshell, apparently a bunch of stuff in poetry is ancient and doesn’t even work with this git repo anymore. Or maybe not my system? I can’t tell.
So I tried uv. Worked amazing… Until I tried to run the project. Apparently some dependency of matplotlib uses Python C libraries in a really bizzare nonstandard way, so the slight discrepency broke an import, which broke the library, which broke the whole project on startup.
So I bet the bullet, cleared a bunch of disk space and installed conda instead, the repo’s other official recipe. Didn’t freakin’ work out of the box either. I finally got it to work with some manual package version swapping, though.
And there was, of course, zero hope of doing any of this with actual pip, apparently.
At this point I wasn’t even excited to test the project anymore, and went to bed.
I feel NixOS shines more on a server or specific setups. It’s kind of meant for development also and occasionally you’ll see some flakes or CI workflows in some project repositories. Idk I have a shell with a fhs environment and pip but it took some extra steps to get numpy, tensorflow and all C/C++ dependencies working but now I just use that for the Python stuff. And we have Distrobox, Docker/Podman… But yeah, I’ve invested more time in NixOS config and packaging than I’m willing to admit. Not only is it necessary to learn the functional programming language to write the declarative config… You’ll also have to learn how a million of gears hook into each other to make things happen in the background. It’s often not possible to do simple things without that additional (very specific) background knowledge.
“Not only is it necessary to learn the functional programming language to write the declarative config”
Holy shit haha! I’ve never actually looked into NixOS but this right here tells me it isn’t for me.
I get that this seems very intimating, but if you’ve ever used more than three programming languages in your life, I believe you won’t have much to learn.
I can mimic the syntax and I very roughly understand how the import system works. But I don’t know Nix! Yet I haven’t had any trouble language wise over the last few years.
In my experience most of the “code” you write is package names and those can be copied from search.nixos.org.
In that sense I’m effectively using it as a markup language and I don’t think anyone has ever gotten discouraged by having to “learn” YAML, just so they can write a config file for some piece of software they want to use.
Something that I would take as discouragement is the state of the documentation. It has been improving to a usable level in some areas but other areas are heavily outdated or just plain missing.
Used it then thought why everything is more difficult.
My motivation for using NixOS is maintenance. I’ve been running 2-3 personal Linux computers for the last decade, with one of them being a server.
To get stuff like services working with each other you sometimes need to make small changes to the config files of some services. The issue for me especially with the many services running on the server is coming back to a broken/misbehaving machine after 4+ months and now having to research what changes I made long ago and where those config files are buried.
Making the change and testing it would likely take less than 5 minutes if you had every detail you need fresh on your mind.
I simply don’t have the mental capacity to remember all that stuff after months of working on other things. Especially if you’re coming back to something broken this is a really annoying position to be in.
You want the fix now but have to start by looking up docs and trying to figure out what past-self did to get you into this mess, or to find out what has changed since then.
At some point I had enough and was either going to teach myself some sort of personal changelog / documentation system, or learn a new declarative configuration system.
Huge respect for anyone who can keep all this info in their mind and to those that meticulously update their own documentation, but I lack the discipline to do so in the heat of battle and will easily miss things.
Since then any system that I will have to maintain myself has been using some form of declarative management. It keeps all configuration accessible and organized in one place, so I don’t have to go digging for the correct file paths. It self updates so that even when I go back and forth during testing I won’t miss updating my standalone docs.
And NixOS brings this to my whole system. No old programs lying around because you forgot to uninstall them and have now forgotten about it. Same thing with pinned package versions that then wreak havoc once they’re incompatible with the updated rest of the system. It even configures my goto tools (shell, editors, etc) to my personal liking when I set up a new machine.
Its not the first declarative system and probably won’t be the last one I will use, but for now it really makes my life noticeably easier.
I’m not a programmer. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I wish it did. I’ve tried teaching myself Python, and I took a semester of Java. I understand pretty much zero.
I don’t understand why some people insist on recommending NixOS as a first Linux distro. It’s so far from the norm and beginner friendliness they must surely be joking.
I’ve been using Linux since 2007, and have tried many distros. I’m very happy with (and recommend) Linux Mint Debian Edition.
And everything is difficult in it. I don’t understand the advantage for a desktop of a declarative OS either.
I run NixOS on all my devices including servers, desktop & laptop.
I’m able to configure a service, container, package whatever really and have it run just the same on another system without worrying about dependencies, reconfiguring or copying dots.
There isn’t a worry about installing / removing something and having that package break my system. Even if I did break my install I can boot from a USB, pull my config down from my local git or a mirror and be back in what is essentially the same system.
The hardest part of a reinstall for me is setting up drives, but that too can be a part of a config.
NixOS is the only distro that stuck with me, I tried Proxmox / Ubuntu / Arch / Manjaro but none of those really clicked for what I wanted / needed from an OS.
The idea is that “you can’t break the system” and you have snapshots you can roll back to in case you do. Which is all well and fine. I think there’s a whole lot of xkcd 2501 going on. As a baseline I don’t even think many people who play games are very comfortable poking in ini config files, and you want them to write configs for their entire system? Don’t forget you shouldn’t blindly copy scripts from the internet without understanding them first as well!
I recently installed NixOS on my server instead of Debian. OP most have done some really fancy stuff to have had the problems described, but I agree with having to relearn everything from scratch. As for flakes and home manager, I just ignored them. Too much to learn as is.
You won’t really need home-manager on a server anyways. It’s for managing the configuration files in your home-folder, so you might customize the shell of your root user with it and that’s about it.
Home-manager makes a lot more sense on desktop computers. I actually have kind of the opposite ‘problem’. I started out by using home-manager on a different distro and even though I switched to NixOS by now (because the other distro’s installation mysteriously imploded one day), I haven’t bothered to learn the non-home-manager way yet. You can do almost everything in home-manager, too, at least when you don’t need to administer for multiple users.
And as for Flakes, I feel like they sound a lot scarier than they are. If you’re just an end user (not trying to distribute Flakes to others), then it’s basically just a handful of different commands to use and one more Nix file at the root of your configuration. I had to sit myself down for an hour or so to figure that stuff out and I haven’t touched it much since then.
I can understand not prioritizing them, though. It’s not like you switch to Flakes and then everything is different. It’s mostly just a different way of doing things, a different set of complexity (they replace Nix Channels, for example), which makes your configuration more reproducible, should you ever need that.
I was wondering why he couldn’t just use the normal way of modifying configuration files to configure Xfce.
Here on KDE, about half my configurations are stuff likeconfigFile.kwinrc.Windows.FocusPolicy = "FocusFollowsMouse";, which basically just modifies~/.config/kwinrcto contain a section:[Windows] FocusPolicy = FocusFollowsMouseThis isn’t always pretty, especially when the configuration format is itself not the prettiest, but it seemed a lot simpler than using this
xfconfthing.But well, the reason is that Xfce’s configuration format is severely ugly. Namely, it’s in XML.
XML is a markup language, not a configuration language, so it has a far more complex structure, which you cannot easily formulate in the Nix syntax.You could still include those XML files as a whole and have Nix roll them out with some mild templating. But yeah, at that point, Nix doesn’t actually do much.
I don’t agree that you have to use Sway (configuring KDE works well for me, for example), but yeah, some pieces of software will just not have decent configuration files, so if you want to use those, you have to configure them the non-Nix way.
I do wish NixOS wasn’t as much of an investment, so that folks could just appreciate it when it helps them configure something and wouldn’t be disappointed where it can’t do that.
To some degree, I feel like using just Nix Home-Manager on another distro alleviates that, but it has some other pitfalls and I’m not yet wizard enough to know all the benefits that NixOS’ particular way of doing things brings along.I feel like every time I see a blogpost like this, the author is experiencing a substantial amount of cognitive dissonance.
Besides stating that their python scripts don’t work the usual way, it’s just a wall of text, expressing “I don’t care about the features nix offers, and i’ve tried using it the way it’s not meant to be used, therefore it’s bad”.
Surely you don’t have to be a phd in compsci to understand that this doesn’t make any sense
