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It’s also developer-friendly because of its excellent wiki.
I learned Linux doing everything by hand on a Slackware system, then moved to Ubuntu after ~8 years when I realized I’d stopped learning new things. Then a couple years ago I realized I didn’t understand how a bunch of things worked anymore (systemd, pulseaudio, Xorg, more). I looked at various distros and went with Arch because its wiki had helped me almost every time I’d had an issue.
Speaking of distros, I’m currently learning Nix and NixOS. It’s very nice so far. If I can learn to build packages I’ll probably replace lobsters-ansible with it (the recent issues/PRs/commits tell a tale of my escalating frustration at design limitations). Maybe also my personal laptop: I can experiment first with using nix to try xmonad first because it’s mostly configured by editing + recompiling) and deal with python packaging, which has never worked for me, then move completely to NixOS if that goes well.
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The Arch wiki actually seems to be the only good documentation for using the advanced functionality of newer freedesktop components like pulseaudio, or much older software like Xorg.
But I’ve noticed it’s documentation for enterprise software like ZFS is usually hot garbage. Not surprising given the community. The recommendations are frequently hokey nonsense: imaginary micro-optimizations or blatantly incorrect feature descriptions.
What do you find better about nix for making packages than, say, making an rpm or deb? I’ve found those package systems valuable for large scale application deployment. Capistrano has also been nice for smaller scale, with its ability to deploy directly from a repo and roll back deployments with a simple symlink swap. And integration libraries are usually small enough that I’m comfortable just importing the source into my project and customizing them, which relieves so many minor tooling frustrations overall.
Of course in the end the best deployment system is the one you’ll actually use, so if you’re excited about packaging and deploying with nix, and will thus devote more time and energy to getting it just right, then that’s de facto the best option.
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What do you find better about nix for making packages than, say, making an rpm or deb?
I don’t, yet. The “If I can learn to build packages” sentence links to an issue I’ve filed. I was unable to learn how to do so from the official documentation. I’ve almost exclusively been working in languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript) that rpm/deb have not had good support for, prompting those languages to each implement their own package management systems that interface poorly or not at all with system packaging.
I’ve used Capistrano, Chef, Puppet, and currently use Ansible for deployment. Capistrano and Ansible at least try to be small and don’t have a pretensions to being something other than an imperative scripting tool, but I’ve seen all of them break servers on deployment, let servers drift out of sync with the config, or fail to be able to produce new deployments that match the existing one. Nix/NixOS/NixOps approach the problem from a different direction; it looks like they started from what the idea of system configuration is instead of scripting the manual steps of maintaining one. Unfortunately nix replicates the misfeature of templating config files and providing its own config file on top of them instead of checking complete config files into a repo. Hopefully this won’t be too bad in practice, though it’s not a good sign that they implemented a programming language.
I appreciate your closing sentiment, but I’m not really trying to reach new heights of system configuration. I’m trying to avoid losing time to misconfiguration caused by services that fundamentally misunderstand the problem, leading to booby traps in common usage. I see almost all of my experience with packaging + deployment tools as a loss to be minimized in the hopes that they waste less time than hand-managing the global variables of public mutable state that is a running server.
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Hmmm. I don’t think the problems you listed are 100% avoidable with any tool, just easier in some rather than others.
I like Puppet and Capistrano well enough. But I also think packaging a Rails application as a pre-built system package is definitely the way to go, with all gems installed and assets compiled at build time. That at least makes the app deployment reproducible, though it does nothing for things like database migrations.
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What do you find better about nix for making packages than, say, making an rpm or deb?
Let me show you a minimal nix package:
pkgs.writeScriptBin "greeter" "echo Hello $1!"Et voila! You have a fine nix package of a utility called
greeterthat you can let other nix packages depend on, install to your environment as a user or make available innix-shell. Here’s a function that returns a package:greeting: pkgs.writeScriptBin "greeter" "echo ${greeting} $1!"What you have here is a lambda expression, that accepts something that you can splice into a string and returns a package! Nix packages in
nixpkgsare typically functions, and they offer an a great amount of customizability without much effort (for both the author and the user).At work, we build, package and deploy with nix (on the cloud and on premises), and we probably have ~1000 nix packages of our own. Nobody is counting though, since writing packages doesn’t feel like a thing you do with nix. Do you count the number of curly braces in your code, for instance? If you’re used to purely functional programming,
nixis very natural and expressive. So much so that you could actually write your application in the language if it’s IO system were designed for it.It also helps a lot that nix can seamlessly be installed on any Linux distro (and macOS) without getting in the way of its host.
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If I can learn to build packages I’ll probably replace lobsters-ansible with it
Exactly. I don’t have much experience with Nix (none, actually). But in theory it seems like it can be a really nice OS-level replacement for tools like Ansible, SaltStack, etc.
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This is exactly what NixOps does! See here.
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Thanks for the video. I’ll watch it over the weekend!
Curious - are you also running NixOS on your personal machine(s)? I’ve been running Arch for a long time now but considering switching to Nix just because it makes so much more sense. But the Arch documentation and the amount of packages available (if you count the AUR in) is something that’s difficult to leave.
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Yes, I’m using it on my personal machine :). I wouldn’t recommend switching to NixOS all at once, what worked for me was to install the Nix package manager, use it for package management and creating development environments, and then only switch once I was fully convinced that NixOS could do everything I wanted from my Ubuntu install. This took me about a year, even with me using it for everything at work. Another approach would be to get a separate laptop and put NixOS on that to see how you like it.
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Interesting. I’ll try it out for some time on a VM to get a hang of it. Thanks for the info!
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Even as a Ubuntu user, I’ve frequently found the detailed documentation on the Arch wiki really helpful.
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I really want to use Nix but I tried installing it last month and it doesn’t seem to have great support for Wayland yet which is a deal breaker for me as I use multiple HiDPI screens and Wayland makes that experience much better. Anyone managed to get Nix working with Wayland?
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Arch’s wiki explaining how to do everything piecemeal really seems strange given its philosophy is assuming their users should be able to meaningfully help fix whatever problems cause their system to self-destruct on upgrade. It’s obviously appreciated, but still…confusing, given how many Arch users I’ve met who know nothing about their system except what the wiki’s told them.
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I’m happy to help if I can! I’m on the DevOps team at work, where use it extensively, and I did a presentation demonstrating usage at linux.conf.au this year. All my Linux laptops run NixOS and I’m very happy with it as an operating system. My configuration lives here.
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I made a small change to the example to get it to build, and I’ve added it as a comment to your issue.
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What’s the best way to use Mastodon? I appreciate its dedication to privacy, but the distributed nature of Mastodon confuses me. I feel like it’s the World of Warcraft server problem, where it’s impossible to find a server with all your friends on it without one server having everyone on it.
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Many of us in the BSD world went with https://bsd.network/.
You might try the instances.social finder: https://instances.social/.
One of the things I like about Mastodon is I can join a server (or servers) that are more closely aligned to my interests. By monitoring the instance timeline I see all the posts. I don’t have to find a bunch of people to follow immediately. I can grow the list by following the folks I notice posting things I enjoy reading.
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Probably https://functional.cafe
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Replace instance with server and mastodon with e-mail. Then all these explanations become less confusing. Unless your server’s admin or your peer’s admin blocks your messages, you can write messages to every peer on every other server as you see fit.
Does that make sense to you?
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With sites like joinmastodon.org or instances.social, I haven’t experienced this to be too much of a problem. Yes, it takes a while, but you can always delete an account and create a new one on another instance.
To me, the real problem seems to be the difficulty to find interesting accounts to follow, and create a informative, fun and interesting stream. There are a lot of inactive accounts, regardless of the server (mine is one of these), and some active ones, but I can’t really re-create the same level of experience as on twitter, reddit or image boards, for example, even though I have stopped using all of these by now.
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The flagship instance is overloaded and has some trouble scaling; I’d recommend finding something else, if only to ease the burden on the poor folks doing ops on it.
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[Comment removed by author]
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I think it’s usually because “that’s what work is buying me”.
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I really like Lenovo X1 Carbon.
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Personally I like the Dell XPS 13 and 15. The 4K screens are really amazing to see in person. You can configure with an i7 processor, optional fingerprint reader, fast SSDs up to 1TB, up to 32GB RAM, touch/non-touch display options, up to 97Wh battery in the ~4.5lb model or 56Wh in the 4lb if you want to go lighter (benchmarks). For ports, it has an SD card slot, 2 USB-A 3.0 with PowerShare, 1 HDMI, and a Thunderbolt 3 (including power in/out).
I feel they compete in several of the categories and are worth checking out in person somewhere (Frys, etc) if you’re in the market. Just earlier today someone posted a link to this guy’s experience spending a year away from MacOS and he winds up with an XPS 15, which he mostly likes.
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I went from a 2011 macbook pro 15” to a thinkpad 460p running kubuntu, its not as flush as the macbook but it beats performance & price for me. Form factor, I should’ve got a 15” again but thats my choice. Fit & finish on the macbook is better but then I can easily remove my battery and get to all the internals of the laptop, so I prefer the thinkpad.
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The new Huawei Matebook X?
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How about the ASUS ZenBook Pro? I don’t have experience with it, but superficially it’s got very similar form factor and design to a MacBook. Aluminum uni-body and all. And being not-Apple, you obviously get better performance for the price.
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I’ve run Linux on a Macbook because my employer wouldn’t give me anything else. Reason was: effort of IT team vs my effort of running Linux.
But pretty sure my effort was extensive compared to what their effort would have been :)
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16:10 screen, wide-gamut display, correct ppi (X1C is too low, and the high-res Dells too high).
The last ThinkPad (of which I have many) to have a 16:10 screen was T410, which is now 8 years old.
Personally, there’s no other modern laptop I’d rather use, regardless of operating system. To me nothing is more important than a good and proper screen.
If anybody comes up with a laptop that has a 4:3 screen, I’ll reconsider.
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It does, but tragically it’s ruined by a glossy finish on the screen. I bought one for the aspect ratio and brightness but almost threw it out the window several times in frustration before giving it away.
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I don’t think many people buy new Apple hardware with the intention of immediately wiping it and installing Linux.
My MBP, for example, is running OSX because I need it (or Windows) to use Capture One photo software. When I upgrade to a new machine I’m going to put Linux on the old one and use it for everything else. I did the same thing with my iMac years ago.
I personally still think the build quality of Apple laptops are better than the alternatives. The trackpad in my old MBP, for example, still feels better than the trackpads I’ve used on newer machines from other brands. The performance and specs are less important to me as long as it’s “fast enough” and the build is solid.
All that said, I’m not buying any more Apple products because their software quality has completely gone down the toilet the last few years.
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In this case I didn’t really have a choice. I had tried asking for a PC before I started this job; but they tried to get me in really fast and provisioned a Mac without even asking me. My boss made up some bullshit about how you have to have them for developers laptops as the PCs the company bought didn’t have the specs (16GB of ram and such). I’m really glad I got Linux booting on it and not have to use it in VMWare (which does limit your max ram to 12GB and doesn’t give you access to the logical HT cores).
But yea if it was my personal laptop, I wouldn’t even bother buying a mac to being with. My recent HP had everything supported on it with the latest Ubuntu or on Gentoo with a stock kernel tree right out of the box.
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A slack export viewer in Haskell and Reflex.
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A single port?
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Yes, but it is USB-C. According to http://www.anandtech.com/show/8518/hands-on-with-usb-type-c-reversible-usb-connectors
This opens up the possibility for a dock scenario where a single cable to the monitor can charge a laptop and also mirror the laptop’s display onto the external monitor, and the external monitor would also be able to serve as a USB hub for a keyboard, mouse, headsets, flash drives, and other USB peripherals.
Also, Apple sells these accessories:
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To which I’d need to chain another USB hub and a USB-ethernet adapter, unfortunately.
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But look it from a different perspective.
After coming back home, I only need to plug one cable to the Macbook for doing all of these: charge the laptop, connect to external display, connect to other accessories. In the long-run, I bet that this convenience would win over the reluctant need to buy an extra accessory.
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But would it be that much better than any other laptop dock? I mean, it’s smaller, but I’d rather use the lenovo usb 3.0 dock than this thing where you’d have to daisy chain another usb dock to use a keyboard and a mouse.
It’s hard for me to regularly admit that I’m just not their audience, even though I drool over retina screens and thin laptops. The dichotomy of what I want and what is possible is frustrating.
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I already only need to plug two cables into my MBP: power and Thunderbolt. Everything else (Ethernet, USB keyboard and mouse and headphones) plugs into the Thunderbolt display.
How is that supposed to work if you have both an MBP and one of these new ones as your ultraportable? Is there going to be a USB-C to Thunderbolt adapter that actually supports using a Thunderbolt hub like this? I’d be really surprised if that happens or is even technically feasible.
More likely, now you’ll need one monitor to hook up to your MBP, and a second monitor to hook up to your USB-C MacBook, and then whenever you want to switch you’ll have to unplug all your shit from the Thunderbolt display and plug it into a USB-C hub.
This USB-C MacBook makes more sense if you don’t have any existing Macs.
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So, I have to pay at least 79,99 USD just to connect an external display and/or any single USB device?
And then I also have to buy an extra HDMI to DisplayPort adaptor/cable for all of my DisplayPort monitors without HDMI (which is, like, most of them), since Apple doesn’t even have any USB-C to mini-DisplayPort adaptors? WTF? Are they declaring mini-DisplayPort dead, after only a few years of finishing up the switch over to Thunderbolt?
Why are they only selling adapters to connect MacBook to a “TV or projector”? What about the plentiful DisplayPort monitors?
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On the contrary - I’m in the Midwest and my kids go to a smaller public school - Apple TV is - literally - in every classroom.
I’m also a software development consultant - almost every conference room I end up in has an Apple TV on the monitor.
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Interesting. I’ve never seen AppleTVs in a university classroom, in either Denmark or the US. Most of our classrooms in Denmark have projector systems that are about 5-7 years old, with VGA/DVI connectors. A few more recently refurbished ones have recently (2012-2014) added HDMI connectors. I think they’re currently waiting to see what will win out before doing further upgrades. There was a proposal to add HDMI everywhere, but they didn’t want to spend the money unless they were sure HDMI would be the connector of choice for the next 5 years or so. It might be that jumping straight to wireless is what happens.
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Yeah; that might be a sticking point some places. I worked a place where it was an offence to plug anything into USB ports, and the security people were discussing plugging USB ports using a hot-glue gun. Possibly for the same reason, PS-2 mice and keyboards were preferred at this place.
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Moving into a new apartment tomorrow, helping a friend move on sunday.
Though I forgot to rent a truck and now everything is booked… I did find something, but it’s going to cost me.
Who else but a Québécois move on July 1? :-P
I’m moving over this weekend as well, and I’m from Florida as opposed to Quebec. If you’re going to move, summer is as good a time as any
I’m moving tomorrow too. Spent the past month packing so I’m not stressed for it. Going to feel like 45C in Montreal. At least it will not be on July 1st when the whole world is moving and feels like 48C.
Good luck to you!
I found this funny so I’d like to mention it: boxes are storage of spacetime. You pack things in the present, you have stored that time (saved it) in the future. It also takes up space. Thus, a box is a spacetime storage medium :D
Thank you and good luck to you as well! I’m starting to move at 7h30 so hopefully I can escape part of the heat..