jkap

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jkap
@jkap

i've been getting increasingly frustrated by the software on my NAS. truenas scale has just been constantly broken for me, increasingly unperformant, and lost support for any real applications with truecharts having a meltdown, so i opted to just bite the bullet and rebuild everything from scratch in nixos.

so far? it's fuckin great. i've never used nix for anything serious (i've played around with dev-shells and the like) but it's working well here. my biggest complaint is that the docs are, by and large, Not Great. but i've dealt with bad docs in the past and i'm getting by.

that said: i get the impression that using this for desktop linux would be a fucking nightmare. nix (the package manager) would probably be fine, and i'm considering giving nix-darwin a try, but trying to use this for a daily driver seems like it would get frustrating fast. for a server though? feels unbeatable.

good impressions so far. i might share my configuration once i've got something worked out. thanks


jkap
@jkap

now that i've gotten a better feel for this (and home-manager especially) i am realizing that this would probably work well for daily driving. it's kinda making me want to get nix-darwin going on my mac. much to think about.


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in reply to @jkap's post:

I've really wanted to try out NixOS more, and I definitely want to try it on a server at some time in the future. The last time Manjaro shat itself completely on my laptop I tried NixOS for like an hour before going with EndeavourOS instead, just because I needed something that would let me get back to work without a real learning curve, haha.
I've definitely been tempted to try it on my secondary older laptop though, which is still running Manjaro, since I don't use it as my daily driver at home.

I've been using NixOS on my desktop for... I'll say a several months, and while it can be very frustrating it also afflicted me with a curse. I kind of like it.

Consolidating the stupid Computer things I have to deal with into one config is hard to give up. I feel great anxiety engaging with many different systems to manage simple things, but most solutions on NixOS become just one or a handful of settings. That or it contains more complex configs. Annoying udev rules required to get my tablet or colorimeter working? I still have to pretend I understand udev at all, but at least it's wrangled into one manageable place.

Working with binaries is a Pain In The Ass, but I respect the vision. I see the promise in managing my dev environments. It would just be a lot less painful if I didn't need to study YouTube videos to set a foundation for understanding the systems. Distrobox helps patch the holes at least.

Still much to evaluate, but it's been interesting.

Huh, TrueNAS Scale has been pretty solid for me, and I switched to docker inside an LXC container (with jailmaker) for the apps (Dockge provides a nice GUI around Docker Compose). Iโ€™ll admit I know very little about NixOS, so like, did you end up having to re setup all your storage pools by hand and everything? Because I think I would shit my pants if I had to do it and risk losing data if I mess up lol

you've gotta tell it to import the pools but (assuming you've got the pools already setup) it's pretty impossible to accidentally wipe the zfs drives. just like. don't do anything that looks like you're gonna wipe a drive

If your comfortable doing it I would love to see more configs for NixOS servers published online/in repos. I'm in the same boat as you just significantly more stupid and I'm getting vexed by all the different ways of approaching it.

Amen on the documentation, it also feels like everyone desperately wants it to be for the desktop, but I personally think the promise of declarative systems works so much better for servers than anything.

i think once i've got things more finalized i'll throw my config online. right now everything's too in flux (but i do really love how well it handles everything being in flux. i can just change shit around and it work! and cleans itself up! wild)

I'm interested in hearing what use cases were breaking/not doing well for you on scale. My impression has generally been "run stuff as apps when at all possible" and it sounds like truecharts were always a little half baked. It can run VMs but it's a lil clunky for that in my experience. Functional, but clunky.

It's what I steer most people towards for "please start storing things on a NAS", most people just want storage and some off the shelf apps for that. Good to know of any more common uses that it'd be a bad fit for.

in reply to @jkap's post: