Today, I wanted to have another go with nix. Previously I just read about it and didn’t do anything for a couple of months. Now, I installed nix package manager with very few lines of code and two more to install many packages as described in his post. Installation was very fast on my banana laptop. Until now I used distrobox but I always wondered which distro/ package manager to use. What’s your experience with it? For now, I’ll test it. It’s super easy to use. It may not be straight forward to a linux newcomer but if you know what you want, e.g. ffmpeg you can just add it with home-manager edit and install it with home-manager switch. So far, I love it!

  • boredsquirrel
    8•6 months ago

    Dont. uBlue also switched away from it.

    My question is, how do I remove it again?

    • Chewy
      2•6 months ago

      Removing nix is mostly done by deleting /nix, and removing some systemd services, as well as deleting some nix-related users or groups (iirc nixblkd)

      Because almost all of nix happens in /nix it doesn’t clutter much of the system.

      • boredsquirrel
        2•6 months ago

        /nix doesnt work on Fedora Atomic, thats the thing. So it has to be somewhere else.

        I still have dozens of strange Nix users left

          • boredsquirrel
            4•6 months ago

            Dont know how they solve it, but /nix is not possible.

            Maybe in /var/nix and symlinked or mounted to /nix

            • Chewy
              1•6 months ago

              Yes, that’s likely the case.

              The ahayzen/silverblue-nix guide uses bind mounts from /var/lib/nix to /nix. The latter being created by making / temporarily writeable with chattr +i /.

          • boredsquirrel
            1•6 months ago

            disabling SELinux

            I hope this is not a serious suggestion?

            This needs correct SELinux labels, and not just disabling it.

            Dan Walsh is very sad.

            • Chewy
              2•6 months ago

              It seems the Determinate Nix installer supports Fedora Atomic with SELinux enabled.

              supporting SELinux and OSTree based distributions without asking users to make compromises

              https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

              Edit:

              disabling SELinux

              I hope this is not a serious suggestion?

              Since no nix installer supported SELinux at the time, it was the only way to use nix on Fedora Atomic. With a better option available disabling SELinux is a bad idea indeed.

            • Chewy
              2•6 months ago

              It seems the Determinate Nix installer supports Fedora Atomic and SELinux.

              On topic:

              I really like Nix and home-manager. I’ve mostly switched to NixOS because it’s more convenient for window manager setups than building ublue images imo.

              Having to mess with containers for different dev environments and keeping the up to date is imo more annoying than creating a shell.nix

              Also being able manage my dorfiles with home-manager and installing software declaratively helps in keeping the system free of clutter.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•6 months ago

      What does uBlue switching away from it have to do with someone wanting to install it on Silverblue?

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        1•6 months ago

        He thought it’s not possible to install nix on silverblue and another commenter tried to install it on secureblue. It’s not possible there. The problem is either somewhere along the supply chain (ublue) or with secure blue

  • @[email protected]
    5•6 months ago

    Bazzite user here and I’m using flatpaks whenever possible and distrobox for everything else; which are the benefits of Nix over these?

    • trevorEnglish
      9•6 months ago

      Nix has more packages , by far. Nix also automatically handles the dependent libraries for each package, which is something you can’t do with brew on immutable systems. This means that Nix can install software like espanso, which wouldn’t work on uBlue derivatives otherwise.

      I really wish the uBlue maintainers would have opted for Nix over brew for that reason. It’s not much more difficult to do nix profile install nixpkgs#package-name over brew install package-name. They could have even aliased it to make it easier.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      6•6 months ago

      It’s faster than distrobox, it’s not within a box but on host, it’s easier than most package managers. I still go for flatpak first but for everything else I use nix. Especially for programming environment it looks to be much better than distrobox

      • trevorEnglish
        1•6 months ago

        Using containers on Linux has basically no performance loss compared to running on the host. They share a kernel and nothing needs to be virtualized (unlike containers on macOS and Windows), so anything you run in a container is basically the same performance as running it on the host.

        I still agree though: using Nix is better than using Distrobox for many other reasons.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          3•6 months ago

          Sorry, faster because installing a package is faster than with other managers since you don’5 have to deal with any copr, debs or anything and it’s really fast on my install. I haven’t compared it directly but it feels very fast.

    • boredsquirrel
      3•6 months ago

      Homebrew for CLI. Distrobox needs to be used with Arch, at least the Fedora boxes are literally not possible to system upgrade.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•6 months ago

      Nix is useful for CLI packages, which aren’t very simple to use through flatpak. It also has far more packages, and is very useful for creating development environments.

  • @[email protected]
    5•6 months ago

    I like it, though I’ve used it very little (just no need, ATM). They have some decent practice examples to go through, but it’s definitely a unique way of thinking about package management.

  • @[email protected]
    3•6 months ago

    Until now I used distrobox but I always wondered which distro/ package manager to use. What’s your experience with it?

    The answers found below this post resonate with my own experiences.

    I do have a question: When you run the sestatus command in the terminal, what string/description is found corresponding to “Current mode”?