NixOS – Purely Functional Linux Distribution

Another fascinating thing about NixOS is their system of automated integration tests for the whole distribution. You can quite easily set up declarative virtual machines with Nix expressions, and the test suites use this in very cool ways. Graham Christensen mentions some of these tests here: https://grahamc.com/blog/an-epyc-nixos-build-farm > The NixOS release process is novel in that package updates happen automatically as an entire cohesive set. We of course test that specific software compiles properly, but we…

NixOS has been discussed many times on HN already. However, Nix 1.9 was released today (/yesterday for the some): Release Notes: https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.9/manual/#ssec-relnotes... Downloads: https://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.9

I played with NixOS and am willing to admit that it was too difficult. It's probably great for devops, but it's just slightly too rigid for my own personal use. Let me give an example: let's say you want to use xmonad on top of Plasma. NixOS doesn't have any simple way to configure that. You have the mutually exclusive options for one or the other, basically. I know Nix is powerful enough to do this, if I wanted to…

I'll be honest, the first few times I tried using Nix I just couldn't get into. It was too complex for the benefits I was getting. But that was using Nix on another OS. I recently switched to NixOS because I wanted what they were selling and the experience this time around was way better. Having no other option but to figure it out made me learn the essentials real quick (like an exchange program to a foreign country that…