NixOS - How the store and packages work 

Phoenix Great to hear! Also check out my other 2 NixOS videos if you haven’t already seen them 😉

hey bud how you doiin ?

Thanks very much! I try hard to make the audio clear and also use noise cancellation as well. I do have music in the background but it's very subtle. If you turn up the volume you'll hear it. I use it to cover up any remaining background sounds and clicks and buzzes etc. Cheers!

Thanks! Not sure how many more I'll make if any. The first one was very popular, but the 2nd and 3rd not so much...

@@Doriandotslash how about one about home-manager for user setup? I'm in the process of reorganizing my dotfiles with home manager and there sure is a lot to discover.

​@DorianDotSlash This could be of interest to you as well (nix flake + home-manager): ​@@pinpox yeah this is quite nice. Combined with nix flakes, you can update your environment directly from a configuration on github which is just insane. Install the nix flake experimental feature: nixos.wiki/wiki/Flakes then just do: sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake github:Narice/nixos-system/master and you'll have my config (with users etc, so maybe clone it and change a few things before using it x))! Just INSANE. And it will always work due to a flake.lock file that makes sure that the build is 100% reproducible (minus very rare events such as the deletion of a dependency, but this is very limited) I have home-manager directly in my flake so my configuration comes from there. I still have to migrate all my dotfiles to there but it's a good work in progress Also as an added bonus, you can put the flake wherever you want on your system, meaning that you do not need to use sudo to edit your files ;) Here is an example of a fully organized configuration based on nix flake: github.com/cideM/dotfiles The guy has his entire config in there which is super useful.

@@Doriandotslash a video on setting up flatpak and snaps would be interesting

Burke Libbey has a good video on Home Manager on his channel

That's the plan!

Yeah, that's what I said in the video : "do stuff with this stuff" lol I looked into a little bit but didn't get right into it. Thanks for the info!

Thank you and I'm glad you enjoyed the videos! I've considered doing a video on VM's, but after playing with them for abit, I found them to be a little difficult to setup initially. I managed to get one running, but after some updates and a reboot, it woudn't start anymore for unknown reasons so I kind of gave up on it. For my, QEMU/KVM is a MUCH better system for running VM's and I'm going to stick with that.

Thank you! I did try Gobolinux, but not for long. The lack of packages available as well as how old they were immediately turned me off of it.

@@Doriandotslash yeah makes sense and that's a big selling point for me with NixOS, so I'll stick to that. Thanks again!

Benny this is more of saving your system than creating specific versions. After system changes, updates, and adding/removing packages, a new version is automatically saved so that you can revert back to an old version is you should have any problems. It’s more of a backup and not really intended to be used to run parallel configurations. Check my first 2 videos on NixOS as well in order to see more of how it works. Cheers!

@@Doriandotslash That sounds like excellent advice Dorian. I will watch the other two!

Epoch was midnight UTC, and he's in North America, which explains "Dec 31." Still looks pretty funny, though!

There's cerain software that can't be excluded, and cheese is one of them. For some dumb reason core components are dependent on it.

Delta updates are not available for Ubuntu, Debian, Tumbleweed or Arch. So Nix doesn't wear down an SSD any more.

@@pidusredlah But usually when there is an update it might only be a few MB but the whole program is maybe a couple hundred. So it only adds what is new or what is changed? Nix(OS) on the other hand downloads the whole app again and again with every update.

Yes it works quite well! Just make sure you run the updates now and then because it doesn't do it automatically.

NixOS doesn't adhere to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard . Meaning that if your daily usage includes downloading and using pre-built binaries, the NixOS experience is going to be a very rough one. The main benefit of nixos is being able to declare the configuration of your entire system in a single file. You can "sample" the nix ecosystem by just installing nixpkgs in an existing linux or mac machine nixos.org/download.html

Thanks I will try it out for a few days to see if it sticks to what I need

@@Verzach3 if you do want to run arbitrary binaries you download from GitHub/Gitlab/etc another option is to use nix + home-manager on any other distribution What I do for single binaries is if I have 3-5 mins I might package it for nix, if I dont or it requires a more complex packaging process I just whip out an alpine or Debian container

Well, someone pointed out it's because of this : nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#ch-relnotes-0.7

Ryan Mulligan interesting. Thanks for that. Is that info somewhere in the wiki or manual?

@@Doriandotslash Motivation can be found reproducible-builds.org/docs/source-date-epoch/ Can't find anything specific to nixpkgs. However, interesting fact, zip file format isn't compatible with dates prior to 1980.

@@Doriandotslash nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#ssec-derivation at the bottom. I was wrong, the timestamp is set to 1 not 0.

So it's 1970-01-01 00:00:01 UTC and just the timezone on top of that?

@@mskiptr unix timestamp doesnt have a concept of timezones. Just an offset from the epoch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Good thing that if I configure it in a VM the way I like, I can replicate it on real hardware using only one text file. So, maybe it's not so bad.

One hour later, still the only one... :-/