I love NixOS but I really wish it had some form of containerization by default for all packages like flatpak and I didn’t have to monkey with the config to install a package/change a setting. Other than that it is literally the perfect distro, every bit of my os config can be duplicated from a single git repo.
Great points. I kinda feel the same with containerization. I have been wanting change my OS on my home server and while NixOS is great for that, I have decided to do things differently and use OpenSUSE Micro OS. My plan was actually Fedora Core OS, but after that Red Hat drama I decided to run with SUSE instead. It is an immutable distro with atomic upgrades that is designed for being a container host. It uses Ignition as the configuration for setting up things like users, services, networking, etc. My plan is then to just use containers like I was doing before on Fedora Server and for the other things to use Nix to build container images. Instead of using DockerFile, you’d use Nix Flakes to create really minimal images. Instead of starting with a full distro like Alpine, Nix starts from scratch and copies all dependencies over as specified in your flake. So the image only contains the absolute minimum to run. I think I’d be a fun side project while learning more about Ignition, Linux containers and Nix Flakes.
As for your point on config, I think it’s just part of the trade offs of NixOS. You either have a system that can be modified easily at anytime through the shell or you have a system that you modify centrally and is fully reproducible. You can already install packages with nix-env in the command line without changing your config, but that also won’t be reproducible. Maybe a GUI app for managing your config and packages could be helpful, although I’m pretty sure that’s low priority for NixOS right now.
On the config point, I understand NixOS has got the trade off with the config specification, but I was mainly talking about the need for a GUI manager for the config so that regular people could use it. Like it automatically has a flake setup that works with multiple hosts, is synced automatically, has a store app where you can click add on a package then rebuild, etc. Mainly, I don’t want to have to specify gnome on or KDE off, I want to click a button that does that, and for all other things you have to put in the flake. It could also have a little popup window for more advanced config that requires actually editing the code.
Based NixOS user
I love NixOS but I really wish it had some form of containerization by default for all packages like flatpak and I didn’t have to monkey with the config to install a package/change a setting. Other than that it is literally the perfect distro, every bit of my os config can be duplicated from a single git repo.
Great points. I kinda feel the same with containerization. I have been wanting change my OS on my home server and while NixOS is great for that, I have decided to do things differently and use OpenSUSE Micro OS. My plan was actually Fedora Core OS, but after that Red Hat drama I decided to run with SUSE instead. It is an immutable distro with atomic upgrades that is designed for being a container host. It uses Ignition as the configuration for setting up things like users, services, networking, etc. My plan is then to just use containers like I was doing before on Fedora Server and for the other things to use Nix to build container images. Instead of using DockerFile, you’d use Nix Flakes to create really minimal images. Instead of starting with a full distro like Alpine, Nix starts from scratch and copies all dependencies over as specified in your flake. So the image only contains the absolute minimum to run. I think I’d be a fun side project while learning more about Ignition, Linux containers and Nix Flakes.
As for your point on config, I think it’s just part of the trade offs of NixOS. You either have a system that can be modified easily at anytime through the shell or you have a system that you modify centrally and is fully reproducible. You can already install packages with nix-env in the command line without changing your config, but that also won’t be reproducible. Maybe a GUI app for managing your config and packages could be helpful, although I’m pretty sure that’s low priority for NixOS right now.
On the config point, I understand NixOS has got the trade off with the config specification, but I was mainly talking about the need for a GUI manager for the config so that regular people could use it. Like it automatically has a flake setup that works with multiple hosts, is synced automatically, has a store app where you can click add on a package then rebuild, etc. Mainly, I don’t want to have to specify gnome on or KDE off, I want to click a button that does that, and for all other things you have to put in the flake. It could also have a little popup window for more advanced config that requires actually editing the code.