That looks really well done. And a lot of stuff would be condensed by having viduals.

Doesn’t look like my preferred style… Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get into the book either 😅

War and Peace. Heard so many good things about it. Despite everything, went in not having super high expectations.

The whole book turned out like a reality tv show. All the characters had some petty drama that they blew out of proportion. Hundreds of pages where nothing really happens, people just complain or bad mouth other characters.

I had to stop half way through.

Totally get that. Just saying that different people want different things out of their jobs, and it’s a good thing that there are places where all of them can fit.

Isn’t that the whole point of hiring people that fit the company culture? I’ve worked at both types of places in different stages of my life. Both can feel good or bad depending on where you’re at. Don’t try to change the job to fit your needs. Find a different one.

No, I fully understand it. But if you build the whole system where every package is isolated, none of the packages interfere with each other, and every package is tested across a wide array of architectures, you can just as safely put together your ideal OS setup and don’t have to deal with being locked into very simple and bare system.

The right place for immutable OSes is if you’re using it as a server for container workloads, where you will never customize the base system. Or if you never want to customize your system. Yes, you can customize the system image, but it breaks all the guarantees that the images gives you because the packages themselves are not isolated and by bumping a wrong dependency for a custom packages you can still break the whole system.

Already has that. And if you use flakes, you can fully lock down your package versions that way the install is 100% identical on every machine no matter when you run it.

My favorite example of how idempotent NixOS is has to do with the DE. If you’ve ever looked at switching from gnome to KDE, or the other way around, most distros suggest to just re-install because each DE leaves so much cruft around and it’s so hard to remove everything in a safe manner.

With NixOS, you just change one line in your config, and the DE is cleanly swapped.

I would separate NixOS from other immutable distros. NixOS is really about giving you blank slate and letting you fully configure it.

You do that configuration using a static config language that is able to be far more idempotent than Andible. It’s also able to define packages that are well contained and don’t require dynamic linking setup by manually installing other packages.

Immutable distros, on the other hand, really have no advantage to your setup and will probably feel more restrictive. The main use I see for them is for someone new or lazy that wants to get a working system up and running quickly.

I’ve worked on dev tooling in a fairly large company. Especially for cyber security, do not get a Mac. A lot of the tools are just different enough on a Mac that they will make your life much harder.

I would say it’s actually easier in many cases. Nix has really fantastic packaging tooling. You do have to learn a bit of the nix language, however (not become an expert).

The issue comes when trying to build from source. In most other distros, ou just follow the readme. In nix, you have to package it.

My first guess would be emulation for apps that do not run on aarm by default.

A lot of OSS devs don’t want to spend time supporting a closed architecture. Especially some of the more privacy and openness focused apps that you’re running.