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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Unfortunately, the UEFI on my laptop doesn't allow custom keys. I can disable secure boot. I can make and place custom keys, but it never switches over from the initial unprotected state to whatever they call that transition state after the new custom PK key is added. Once all the custom keys are configured and I try to reinstate secure boot in the bios, it flushes the custom keys and recreates a new set automatically using the secret Trusted Protection Module key(s) built into the hardware.
Since my initial failure trying to add custom keys, I've come across Sakaki's old UEFI guide on Gentoo and noted the possibility of maybe installing keys with the EFI KeyTool to boot into EFI directly, but I have not tried it.
Yeah. I wanted to try a flake I came across for an AI app I was having trouble compiling on my own. The flake was setup for a Linux/Windows subsystem though. I tried to install the Nix package manager as a single user because I don't want some extra daemon running or anything that has such an elaborate uninstall as the multiuser Nix lists. At least it is too much to deal with for a short term goal of installing a single app. After installing the single user Nix pm, the flake I was trying to use wasn't listed in the Nix repo and reconfiguring what was already setup looked like a waste of time.
In general I would rather have my entire root directory locked down. I don't really know the real world implications of having a user owned directory in my root file system. It just struck me as too strange to overlook, and it is far too deep into a rabbit hole for my goal that had proved fruitless already. I searched for several of the tools I've had to compile on my own, and none of them were listed in Nix. There are a couple on the AUR but no distro seems to do FOSS AI yet.
I've already been burned by running Arch natively years ago. I dropped it and installed Gentoo which I ran for a few months before switching to Silverblue because I didn't really have the scripting skills to make Gentoo work for me at the time. I'm very weary of any elitist rhetoric about any distro now. When I see stuff like 'Nix is a language you just learn/only for power users,' I have flashbacks of dozens of tabs open in the arch wiki, back when I learned what a fractal link chasm is, and all those times I had to actually use backups to function with Arch; the only time I've ever needed to restore backups in my life. At this point, I think I'm on the edge of transitioning from an intermediate to "power user" after ten years on Linux exclusively, but I know there is a lot of stuff I do not grasp yet. An operating system shouldn't be a project I need to actively manage, maintain, or stop what I am working on for a random tangential deep dive just to use. I can't tell what Nix is like in practice. The oddity of the package manager does not inspire confidence, but I'm admittedly skeptical by default. I see how dependencies are handled better in Nix in some ways, but I do not have infinite storage for a bunch of redundant copies of everything just for every obscure package on my base system. I'm not clear about how Nix does configs and dot files "better" than my present situation. The lack of a deep dive into UEFI security and details about the ability of Nix to coexist in a system with a separate Windows drive (because laptop has a few configuration elements only available in Windows), I haven't tried Nix OS.
No worries, UEFI is definitely a "milage may vary" kinda standard.
I've personally only used NixOS and not Nix on a different distro by itself so I'm less familiar with that setup. No system is perfect for all use cases, but that's sorta the point in Unix-land. I personally have been gripped by NixOS and having to go back to Fedora for some of my old servers has been a pain. They use it like a buzzword all the time, but declarative administration is so awesome. It does have a heck of a learning curve though.
Is the Nix learning curve like Arch's f.u. user-go cry to rsync/CS Masters expectations, or like Gentoo's tl;dr approach of "our packagers know how to create sane defaults and include key info you need for sound decisions" approach. I never want to deal with another distro that randomly dumps me into an enormous subject to read because they made a change in a dependency that requires me to manually intervene in a system update, or any OS that makes basic FOSS tools like gimp and FreeCAD tedious.
In my experience its mostly sane defaults and a mixed bag in terms of documentation. For anyone else reading this, https://search.nixos.org/options using this to search for all the built in options is usually a good enough starting point for installing something.
Nix does dependencies very differently, since every program and everything it needs are put into their own checksummed directory, then linked into your PATH as requested in your config. So far I've never needed to do anything other than
nixos-rebuild --upgrade switchand only needed to reboot for kernel updates.I mostly work in container spaces, so building things from source, or out-of-repo pkgs, while rare, are done in containers with podman. For example, running Automatic1111's stable diffusion works perfectly for me in a container with an AMD GPU no less. Eventually I'd like to get into flakes, but their still marked experimental so I haven't looked too much into it.
Overall the learning experience is figuring out the overall structure of the system, then taking advantage of all the super powerful tooling and consistency those tools offer.