NixOS - Sometimes Different is Brilliant 

First video of yours I've watched, you've got a great speed and style of presenting (:

Once you've gone through the pain of setting up the config file it's the best system out there, Its virtually indestructible.

The reason for why at 12:30 labels are suggested is that it is more reproducible uuid or the device file may under some circumstances change, such as when reformatting the disk, or if you change the disks port on the computer.

12:30. The use of a partition label (GPT) or if not available a filesystem label (eg on legacy partition systems): One reason this can be preferable to /dev/sdX so that you can set the same build up with different hardware partitions later, because having created the partition (or used mkfs -L) everything following uses the name you choose not the hardware-specific name. I already try to do those on most of my installs. However it's only a guess that this is the reason the Nix manual recommends it -- there may be another reason too

If you'll notice on the download page for NixOS there was a virtualbox link you could have clicked to get the virtual Appliance with guest additions installed already.

Thanks OTB for the review of a unique Linux package. I've seen others present NixOS reviews but your charming presentation was more to my liking. I'm unlikely to install NixOS very soon as I need to improve my Linux skills before I venture into something as radical. That said, for those with better skills, NixOS may have more appeal. And thanks to those "boffins" that are smart enough to develop these alternative systems.

The great thing about NixOS os how you can split a host configuration into roles that you import depending on which host it's on or whatever other conditionals you might want. You can have a Git repo that defines pretty much everything about your setup and easily reproduce it on a different machine, or a hundred of them.

This looks really interesting. I think I'm going to have a play with it on a spare laptop. Thanks for the review, I had never heard of it before this.

This does look very interesting ! Controlling the package management via a config file is really appealing. This is like driving a manual (car). I like it ! Makes so much sense to me as a web developer, overriding existing packages and clearing out the old ones, this is how it should be done. Am definitely going to try this one. Congrats on the 12k subs OTB.

That is the most exciting distro I've seen in a very long time; thanks!

I've read some other sources about Nixos the last days. But your instruction made it most clear to me. Thanks!

Oh very nice, the type of stuff I enjoy about Linux. Something to try out this weekend! Cheers!

It's definitely an interesting distro. Hopefully you'll come back to it later. You may also want check Bedrock Linux out.

beautiful video man!!

Love your stuff big inspiration to my channel

Don’t know why you were complaining about resolution. First time I could read the screen without me glasses on!! Great video!! Useful.

This is a awesome lesson thank you

i tried nix os years ago, i cannot remember that config file but i was some bloody linux noob, knowing nothing, but somehow managed to install it, if i remember right, even on harddisk, not in virtualbox. it was probably between some major upgrade of mint, before they managed not to have to install it fresh every main release, so i took the chance to try out this distro, i just stumbled accross somehow :) but i was so scared by the really weird folder structure with the cryptic paths of all the fallback-versions, and i had no idea what a hard link was that time, so the distro did last like half an hour on my laptop back then before i formated it to start of new, never looked back the forever backup system might really be helpful in some circumstances though

using the distro NixOS is so much better than just using the package manager with other distros. Because allows for reproducibility of the building process of the whole system if you work with microservices (kubernetes, etc) this makes it amazingly superior option than the standard container creation scripts.

Thanks for this great video! There are a lot of NixOS videos out there that don't get the point of it. I use it since 2015, now on all my machines and wouldn't use anything else. I also contribute to it and maintain 22 packages, which i consider simpler than on Ubuntu. But you need some time to learn.

Just Great!

Thanks for video, and your time in creating it. I installed latest at time of writing, Racoon, 22.04, in virtualbox using Plasma and their new installer, but before I watched your video. Racoon is definitely better now, but both Firefox and Librewolf don't work for me and I had to install the unwrapped versions. And also I can't build/install a more recent kernel. But NixOS is definitely easier to use than Silverblue. I think I'll keep it on one of my PCs as a real install. Thanks, John (a very old tech bloke) also in UK

this channel is amazing wtf

You were ahead of the curve sir. It's is obviously all the rage these days and evidently for a good reason although jumping ship for new methodology is always somewhat daunting...

Thanks

11:00 If you want a custom resolution on X, just type these commands, for example, here is for 1920x1080 : $ xrandr (to know the name of your virtual display) $ cvt 1920 1080 The output should look something like *# 1920x1080 59.96 Hz (CVT 2.07M9) hsync: 67.16 kHz; pclk: 173.00 MHz Modeline "1920x1080_60.00" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync* Just take the part *"1920x1080_60.00" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync** or whatever it shows for you, copy it, and : $ xrandr --newmode *"1920x1080_60.00" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync** (or whatever it shows for you) and then : $ xrandr --addmode TheNameOfYourDisplay "1920x1080_60.00" Then, go to the settings, and choose that resolution (setting it directly via xrandr (like xrandr -s 1920x1080) can cause some issues sometimes), and everything *should* work, well, plasma on some vms have issues with screen resolution, but it works great on like any other DE

You know you have watched a creator to long when you almost know all the choices that are going to be made... :-) What Xfce? No Gnome... Lol Wow the fonts are weird in Qtile... :-) I thought it was my eyes at first... That is a interesting OS. I kinda like it. No I'm not going to do a install... It would be nice to see the update and tweaks you do in a follow up video... Congrats on the subs! Sorry I did not notice, I'm a bad Bruce... :-( LOL This was a very good video and well presented so don't apologize for you style... You know me I Love a Good Ramble... :-D Thanks for the video OTB! LLAP

Watched a similar video on distrotube Channel but yours is really great.... Clear explanations... Very interesting point of view Would be interested in having a return on full configuration on qtile for example.. With missing packages Tks again a lot for this video

Have you thought about putting a link, in the description, to whichever distro is the subject of the video?

After nixos, other distros feel so dirty. like, who knows what random files you've made to get everything working the way it is. Random xbacklight xorg file to get it working? have fun figuring that out every time you install.

Interesting. If I were to want this approach of a versioned OS as a daily driver I would go with Fedora Silverblue.

I think this screen resolution problem is with plasma itself. I had the same problem with manjaro plasma. So i installed manjaro xfce.

Good video.

I saw this one first. YAY!

I had the same display issue with Kubuntu using qemu and virt manager. Changing the resolution would not take for more than a split second. I think it is a plasma issue.

It looks like hybrid of snap and btrfs snapshots concept, (except btrfs saves only changes not have clone copy like snaps ), I am interested in having few libs with different versions working in same system of nix os cuz that's what they(snap, flatpack,appImage) solve dependency issue.

Yay a OTB video! 2nd comment on with the video! LLAP

@OldTechBloke Try setting VirtualBox to "VBoxSVGA" regardless of the error "Invalid settings detected". Then start Linux and you should be able to resize and adjust resolution without Guest Additions installed.

Now you should compare it with GNU Guix!

Hi there! Why the more informal studio environment?

I am new to linux and so far I think I might go straight to NixOs from Win11. Whats the difference between the home manager and using the configuration file in every day use?

Nice to meet you otb. Can you teach us some really good hacking techniques. I am looking forward to learning amazing knowledge from you. Best regards 😇🙂😁

so you describe your entire system in a single file? I have ~600 lines for emacs alone, does it mean my entire system config should be many thousand lines long? how do you manage that? we split source files for a reason.

have you tried virt-manager? I know some vbox users have a bad first experience (with virt-manager) because they don't install things like qemu-kvm, qemu-user-static, qemu-utils, qemu-block-extra, etc...

build your own configuration file? Reminds me of define the environment in Cobol

This should be really interesting for all of those that have incredibly unstable systems. I have never encountered instability to an app or the operating system due to a newly installed package though. This is not for me I guess.

No matter how good - I go to my dentist if I am wanting pain and a root canal.

hello im Milan, and i found some interesting distros for you to make more videos if you have a freetime. for example: GNU-GuixSD, haikuos, Venom Linux, Redox os, ToaruOS, KolibriOS, MenuetOS, dahliaOS, icaros-desktop, BlissOS, MocaccinoOS, Adélie Linux, Mazon OS, Avouch Linux, NuTyX Linux.Plop Linux, Clear Linux.

the iterations are just symlinks, you don't save space by getting rid of them, you regain space by garbage collecting and optimizing the nix store though

20:40 uuuh, touchpad, that's a tough one... maybe this can be useful for the distro maintainers, if they will come here looking for opinions and feedback... what I have noticed from using Manjaro (libinput) and MX Linux (xinput) these past 3 weeks is that xinput on MX Linux (using the old Synaptics driver, last updated 2018 if I'm not mistaken) has better touchpad movement, more smooth and much more advanced options to configure from terminal, opposed to libinput which offers none. Another example where the "latest and greatest" is not delivering like the older alternatives did. Avoid libinput if you can, or if you depend on laptop's touchpad. Most people will say things like "just buy a mouse", I don't want to buy a mouse, I want the laptop that I've paid money for to simply WORK as intended. And xinput allows me that. Libinput does not.

peppermint is what i just installed on a older laptop and it flies works great and i think so far t he most user friendly. but i like ubuntu lts 20 the best. but thats from working on my servers. adding ubuntu desktop to your distro is best for windows users. it will install the bloatware you are use to. BUT it wont run in background when not using it like windows. always go with the distros who have the biggest community and is on top of all security updates. mints-ubuntu are constantly updating blocks to adware and spyware. so get in good habit daily to do sudo apt update. always keep it up to date.

So, basically, you make a kisckstart file and use it to install the OS? Is that it?

I’m surprised that I couldn’t find any comment mentioning Fedora Silverblue. You should check that out. It’s got some concepts from NixOS with an immutable base that can rollback, and a much less steep learning curve. The only thing it doesn’t have is the declarative reproducible builds from configuration feature. Having said that I’ve been very intrigued by what you’ve accomplished in this video. I’ve been holding back from trying out NixOS due to the steep learning curve, but it looks a lot less intimidating after I watched your video!

Video does not render properly

lightdm configured to allow root login? that's a bug, surely.

NixOS runs on SystemD ?

sudo

I have to say this: for the last 4 years, I have been shielded in my little bubble of comfort because I was using an older computer "frozen" into a custom ISO that I've built with chroot. Everytime my system would break up, a simple reboot would bring me back to ground zero. Such a liberating way to use a computer and to experiment without fear. That being said, I just bought a new machine, which forced me to upgrade distro because of hardware compatibility. Ryzen. Yep, the pain is real. But the gains are awesome too. Back to the story, I download latest and greatest distros in search for the one that I will choose as my main one to build another ISO that I will use in the same manner as in the past. And I've been finding - pretty sadly - that in the last 4 years Linux had a regression, at least for the major mainstream distros that is. Only now that I finally understand why people made so much noise about systemd all these years, I didn't really know what it was, I was unnafected by it most of the time. It's crazy to me that linux community accepted and pushed this forward. It reached a point where the Xfce desktop (currently version 4.14.2-2 as of December 2020) is being shipped BROKEN with any Xfce distro out there, because it will not save your system settings across reboots. The bug itself comes from Xfce, but it is related to changes that were implemented to circumvent systemd's invasiveness. An init system that has 1.3 million of lines of code, and growing. And every updated will break a new different thing. It's a scary outlook for the near future of linux. Being made the jump from Old to New in such a drastic manner, I can notice that it exists. We are in 2020, and most mainstream linux distros out there will not automatically rename your network adapters to eth0 and wlan0. Such a simple, easy to do, fix. Such a simple and elegant solution. MX Linux does it, there was another one in the past that did it too but I don't remember which one.

Sucks for all software that depend on hierachical file system. Sucks for development too. Many languge package managers have problems with hixos environent.

Can you get Nob-free from the services.xserber? :) I'm glad you don't edit typos out as you go, makes the experience human. Thanks.

Is it Nick's OS? I used to get down and dirty with Gentoo, but I'm now a Debian kind a gal.

7:05 It's so mind blowing to me that issues like that are still being part of our lives in 2020. Come on... this is outrageous... If one file is wrong inside of your /home/.../.config/ directory, X will cry like a baby and refuse to start. Or in the case of Xfce that I've been dealing with personally, it will not be able to initialize a session. What happened to programs being able to adapt to the situation at hand? At least Windows does that. The X server of the desktop manager are not able to re-create a working environment for themselves in the event of something breaking. Imagine if a tiny little file in your home directory becomes corrupt for whatever reason, you lose the ability of logging into your computer? That must be a better way to do things. But please, no Poetterings, no.

Package isolation has a downside as well as the advantages. Shared libraries are no longer shared, so if two (or n) packages use the same code from the same library, that code is in memory twice (n times). In fact there is no longer any point having shared libs, you can save a few bytes by hard linking

i love nixos, just the fact it lacks mirrors near mewhich makes it reallllllllllllly slow, and that packaging electron apps is *non-existant* :kek:

Thumb up 4 the video, but for nixos ...not so much... stability by isolation QubesOS... system snapshoots btrfs on QubesOS, and it's a fedora core and you can install any type of package in xen , even exe.... so AFIC it's win-win situation... yes Nixos is a toy to play with, but I don't think it's suitable for a productivity machine.... For working any rock-solid distro ( debian, fedora, leap, any LTS wil do it), but in TTY, period,.... for fun...hmm that's another matter :D PS: Ya lost the hat... hahahahahahaha I thought you loved it....

This looks painful to install. I shall stick with something like Manjaro😳😳

I will follow you just because I share your hatred for GNOME. Or maybe I'm misreading you and you actually like GNOME, in which case I'll unfollow.

Wonderful plaything I suppose , but this seems that it would only be useful to a small niche of Linux lovers who have the time , and inclination to play for hours with a distro. To many this is fun , but to me I see it as a huge hindrance to making Linux accessible and useful on an everyday basis for those who are frustrated with Microsoft , and Mac's choke hold on the computing world. The average and everyday user who wants something easy to use and install would become frustrated very quickly with having to create it all from terminal commands . I do not see this as useful to the other 90 percent of the computing world looking to discover why Linux is superior and useful. I use Zorin and POP OS because of their simplicity of installation , easy maintenance , and dependability. And when they advance to the point of running a few of the Animation and editing suites I use .. I will discard ALL Microsoft , and Mac OS entirely.

Unfortunately, NixOS is bound to systemd.

sudo