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Principal Skinner on Immutable Distros
(infosec.pub)
Am I out of touch?
No, it's the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn't like don't need to follow me to the next build.
In a conventional install, that just means "don't check the checkbox in the installer next time". In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?
I suppose the closest I've gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don't use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.
I’d actually argue the opposite in regards to clutter. If I switch to a new config without the software I don’t want anymore, that software goes away entirely when I do a garbage collect and there’s nothing left over like there might be in ‘’~/.config’’ on a non-immutable system.
IMO, the actual realization of Dolstra’s dream is flakes and home manager. They allow you to boil your whole config down to a git repo where you can track changes and rollback the lock file if needed.
I find it nice to open my config in an IDE and search by string inside of my config where I can comment out whatever I don’t need. Laziness also makes that pretty convenient too. Nix will only attempt to interpret what is accessible in code. If I comment out an import, that whole part of the config seamlessly shuts off. It’s quite elegant.
I’m even more envious of the atomicity of GUIX but IMO, it’s a little too much building the world from scratch for a newb like me.