this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I actually recently switched (back) from Guix to Void for similar reasons.
I already knew lisp and functional programming so actually found Guix configuration via Guile a joy syntactically, so that wasn’t much of an issue. It really was just more complexity and overhead than I needed in my day to day system.
Even after having a good grasp on configuration semantics, I still find hacking away on things simpler on Void. I also feel like the whole system is transparent and at my fingertips, which I didn’t as much with Guix due to the abstraction layer.
It also was definitely slower and more resource intensive (though that’s true for all but Alpine when comparing against Void).
Now I’m eyeing the other kind of immutable distros like Silverblue and Vanilla OS as a potential middle ground, with Void or Arch as my primary box on top of it so I can still use xbps or pacman.
But not out of lack just adventure, Void is a drop dead fantastic distro.
🎉 Same! I've been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.
Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS's, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.
For reproducible configuration in the Arch world, there's a project which always looks good to me: aconfmgr
https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr
I think Arch+aconfmgr+yadm+btrfs == a pretty solid arrangement.
Though I'm of course itching for first class Bcachefs support...
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
Can you give an example in what kind of scenario you would want "identical servers"? In my head that is where tools like ansible come into play..?
You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.
Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.
The great thing about Nix is that it achieves reproducibility with the package manager. Container and Ansible depend on taking a system and documenting steps to bring it to the desired state. This state then might deviate over time (e.g. crashing while updating).
But yes, for most practical use it probably doesn't make much of a difference. For me Nix forces me to document what I'm doing, which I might not do for "quick and simple change" on other systems.