I’ve been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn’t see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.
So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I’m still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.
It’s clear that I’m missing something so please help me understand what it is.
Good points. If you go through the open pull requests on nixpkgs, there’s a lot of stuff that never got through and it’s not obvious as to why. I was happy to see a lot of stuff merged less than a week ago. But at this point, there’s a huge backlog.
As to forking NixOS, which in my opinion means forking Nixpkgs, Guix system seems like a good start. I decided for NixOS because of proprietary packages as I use Steam, and support for secure boot which while still young and only through lanzaboote works very well for what I use it.
I’m glad they exist. It shows that the concepts can be successful using another language. To me, the major downside is exactly what you said: no proprietary stuff. Additionally, it’s LISP.
In a fork, I’d try to change the way decisions are made, which software is used, add linting and autoformatting to repositories, move away from github (maybe by the time I find the time to we’ll have federated sourceforges) and github actions, maybe use nickel or haskell instead of nix, generate documentation from sourcecode, try and use a distributed cache (tahoelafs, ipfs, storj or some other distributed/decentralised file storage), etc. Getting any of that done in the current repos seems like an uphill battle.
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Let us know when you do! It’s a huge undertaking and NixOS has a pretty big network effect. Doesn’t mean no one should tackle creating an alternative. I fully believe declarative distros are the future for any production environment and that the space is far from taken by current distributions.