It’s a thing that’s built on top of wine (Windows application compatibility thingy). Its purpose is to create environments for Windows applications in a very user-friendly manner with a GUI. I think whatever you can do in Bottles, someone could do with the terminal using wine but that’s difficult.
Haven’t used Bottles in a while but you just get the .exe file like you would when using Windows OS, then you put it in the Bottles, and it should run. I have no clue about the details, but if you click enough buttons, it should work properly.
I’m having issues too. I’d just use a VM at that point xD. With Bottles it’s usually hit or miss but with a VM, almost anything works. Sorry friend🤧
Edit: my virtual machine manager of choice is GNOME Boxes because it’s very easy to use. If it doesn’t work it usually means KVM or SVM (one of them) is disabled in your BIOS.
to answer to question in the title, on top of what was already said: i just code them myself. of course, it doesn’t work for everything, but for simple programs, i can write a script or a proper thing that does the specific task i need!
This new entrant in the immutable space is not a replacement for ordinary Ubuntu
Not yet the replacement. It will be and I bet Canonical is targeting 26.04 LTS to do that. This is just the next step of trying to force all their users into Snap, just like when Flatpak was banned from being in by default of community-supported but official Ubuntu variants such as Xubuntu.
My approach has been to slowly learn how to play to the strengths of Linux and not pine after anything on Windows because ultimately I’ve gained a lot more than I’ve lost.
The one piece of software I haven’t been able to avoid keeping around is Sigma Studio, so I have a 10 year old shit top for running it, but it also runs in a VM if I need it. Thankfully I only need to use it once or twice a year.
If you rely on multiple pieces of software for important everyday activities and they aren’t usable in wine or a VM, you probably have no choice but to use the operating system that is the best vehicle for those tools. Doesn’t stop you from also using linux for other stuff, but I can understand how that’s not the same as going all in.
Do you get any output from # virsh list --all and # docker info?
I have a feeling it’s an SELinux issue, and i’m not familiar with how that works at all (yet 😳). May be a good call to purge virt-manager, libvirtd, docker, containerd, and reinstall them…
Edit: Fedora got an upgrade today and vm-manager works again without any issue. Docker remains broken, maybe its matter of time. Thank you for your response!!!
Also, can I “normally”/traditionally install software on NixOS, e.g. through Steam?
Depends on what you mean by traditionally. Steam works without needing any special setup by enabling it in your configuration, just programs.steam.enable = true. There’s also imperative package management with nix profile (don’t use nix-env -i which you will probably come across, it’s broken by design). Personally though I recommend sticking with the declarative configuration and nix-shell which temporarily brings packages in scope for the current shell only.
There’s two different ways of identifying a nix package: its attribute path in the package set, and the name it self-identifies as. Here’s an example where those differ, firefox-esr. Its attribute path is firefox-esr while the package name it reports is firefox.
It’s very fast to find a package by its attribute path since that’s essentially one or more map lookups. In contrary, the package name isn’t unique (for example, firefox and firefox-esr both have a package name of “firefox” because they are built from the same package file just with different sources) and also doesn’t have an index, so to find a package with a matching name you have to search through the entire package set and evaluate every package to get its name and check if it matches.
nix-env -i searches packages by their package name, which as a consequence makes it slow and also unreliable since you might not get the package you were looking for, but instead another with the same name. nix-env -iA somewhat fixes this by installing packages by their attribute path, but even if you use that you get the same issues with nix-env --upgrade since that always searches for packages to update by the installed packages’ names (it might even replace one package with a completely unrelated one which coincidentally has the same name!).
The new nix profile however stores the attribute paths a package was installed from so doesn’t have any of these problems.
Listen to the “Linux User Space” podcast, episode 404. They explain every immutability model af of now. Ubuntu Core is missing.
Ubuntu is creating something new, looks really great but based on snaps, which are not bad packages but rely on a nonfree store that cant be replaced. So meh.
I’ve made the opposite experience. There were loads of snap-specific issues when I used ubuntu. So many that I now recommend not using ubuntu just because of snaps.
VanillaOS and BlendOS also use containers to install apps, just like Fedora Silverblue. In fact, it’s easier to install native packages on Silverblue than it is on VanillaOS. Just set your terminal to start a container by default.
I think it depends on the user :P. NixOS is pretty hard to get into because the documentation isn’t great… but I’d argue it’s one of the most user friendly ways to configure a system, and it can be really nice to copy configurations from other people.
I think it is very interesting in terms of the easy deployment of specific environments, and in terms of writing recipes for new packages.
Having said that, outside of these two rather niche areas for home use, I think it is rather unintuitive and offers no real advantages over more established players that offer a more polished experience, like Fedora for workstation and gaming use.
Dev work is not specific enough. Pip is a nightmare because it just wanted to modify folders that were read only and you never know what it wants to do to your system. Your experience may vary depending on how much the language package manager assumes about your system. If you’re in a container, it will work perfectly, though
Firefox just works, and I installed Steam from nixpkgs and it worked after enabling a few settings. Then I just enabled Proton on every game and it works okay, with a few weird bugs sometimes (although I blame Gnome for messing up alt tabbing sometimes)
Look again at Fedora Silverblue /any other desktop variant. VanillaOSses apx is just a wrapper around distrobox, which is preinstalled on ublue even.
Apx installs apps on containers just as it is possible on Fedora Atomic (the general name for all immutable desktops). You can also layer and remove apps to or from the base OS which is sometimes needed or nice for speed.
On Fedora Atomic you have
flatpak
podman containers (toolbx, distrobox: like apx on VanillaOS but without the great tooling and GUI management, yet)
rootful containers for stuff interacting with systemd, needing USB access etc.
layering or removing packages / changing the OS to something like ublue to let other people do the work, especially for NVIDIA drivers
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively. You can do that through containers, but you can do that with containers on any distro. Where it shines is declaring the complete system configuration (including installed programs and their configuration) in its config file (on file-based configuration, I wouldn’t really consider blendos a viable competitor).
And you can create package configs, but you can also do that for nearly every distro. So, yeah, that confuses me too… I’m not sure what OP was trying to say there.
To clarify, I was referring specifically to its ability to specify the full system configuration in its config file - not overall. But I haven’t used blendos, and my impression is mostly from a quick look at their documentation. They have a snippet with sample configuration. There, they have a “Modules” section, but I couldn’t find what modules are available, what options they have, how to configure them if we want to do something more complex than the available options.
Then containers are clearer: they have a list of installed apps, and then commands to bring them to the desired state (somewhat similar to a dockerfile). But even then, i imagine that if you have a more complex configuration, that’s going to get clunkier.
Do you think the use of OCI containers/images is a mistake/bad choice from blendOS?
No. It’s probably the best way to run packages from Arch, Debian. Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, all on the same system.
How is NixOS different?
NixOS simply doesn’t tackle that problem, so it doesn’t come with containers out of the box. If you want to run packages from other distros on NixOS, you’d probably need to manually configure the containers.
I feel like you’re under the impression that the three distros, NixSO, blendos, and Vanilla OS, have similar goals. I don’t know about Vanilla OS, but the main similarity between the other two is that they’re both non-standard in some way.
But they’re actually solving completely different problems: BlendOS wants to be a blend of different OSes, NixOS wants to have a reproducible, declarative configuration (declarative here means, you don’t list a bunch of steps to reach your system state, but instead declare what that state is).
It’s the probably the best distro for dev work imo. Nix in general is really nice for development. Games work fine — you can just install steam or putrid or whatever, and you can run normal binaries with steam-run.
The single killer feature that convinced me to move to NixOS is the ability to very easily keep separate development environments separate. For instance, if you’re working on multiple dev projects that have different minimum requirements, and you want to ensure that (for instance) you don’t accidentally use features from after boost 1.61 for project A, because that’s the stated requirement, but you need features from boost 1.75 in project B.
In a normal distribution, in order to set up an environment that has the proper version for project A you’d need to set up a chroot, a virtual machine, a complicated set of environment variables in a bespoke script with custom installation paths that you need to set up manually and remember to source, or just install a newer version of boost and rely on continuous integration to catch it if you screw up.
In NixOS, you can set up different shells which all reference the exact correct version of the libraries required for every project, you can have them installed simultaneously and without conflicts, and there’s even a shell hooking program that will automatically load and unload this configuration when you change directories into and out of the project folder. It makes managing many different projects much easier. It’s like a better version of venv, but for everything.
Well, for playing games I use the flatpak version of steam and it works OK.
For dev work, it’s great overall. Especially its ability to create separate reproducible environments with whatever dependencies you need for every project. However, there are some tools (rare, but they exist) that don’t work well with it, and if your dev work happens to need them, it can becomes a problem.
For day to day (i.e. web browsing), it works the same as anything, with one disadvantage: there is a disadvantage here: it downloads a lot more than other distros on update, and uses more disk space. The biggest difference between NixOS, and say Arch, is not how it behaves once it’s up and running, but in how you configure it. Specifically, you have to invest a lot of time to learn how, and set up your system initially. But then reinstalls, and (some of) the maintenance, become easier.
The way nix deals with packages is very different from most distros. If you install a newer version of a package, the older version just gets hidden, not removed. This makes it very easy to rollback or recover from errors, but it does mean you tend to use more space.
In regular FHS distros, an upgrade to libxyz can be done without an update to its dependants a, b and c. The libxyz.so is updated in-place and newly run processes of a, b and c will use the new shared object code.
In Nix’ model, changing a dependency in any way changes all of its dependants too. The package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.0 is treated as entirely different from the otherwise same package a that depends on libxyz 1.0.1 or libxyz 1.0.0 with a patch applied/new dependency/patch applied to the compiler/anything.
Nix encodes everything that could in any way influence a package’s content into that package’s “version”. That’s the hash in every Nix store path (i.e. /nix/store/5jlfqjgr34crcljr8r93kwg2rk5psj9a-bash-interactive-5.2-p15/bin/bash). The version number in the end is just there to inform humans of a path’s contents; as far as Nix is concerned, it’s just an arbitrary name string.
Therefore, any update to “core” dependencies requires a rebuild of all dependants. For very central core packages such as glibc, that means almost all packages in existence. Because those packages are “different” from the packages on your system without the update, you must download them all again and, because they have different hashes, they will be in separate paths in your Nix store.
This is what allows Nix to have parallel “installation” of any version of any package and roll back your entire config to a previous state because your entire system is treated as a “package” with the same semantics as described above.
Unless you have harsh data caps, extremely slow connections or are extremely tight on disk space, this isn’t much of a concern though.
Additionally, you can always “garbage collect” old paths that are no longer referenced and Nix can deduplicate whole files that are 1:1 the same across the whole Nix store.
I would disagree. I feel like nixpkgs has pretty much everything, more so than any other distro in my experience. The differences in how NixOS work can make it a little weird to run something off the cuff, but steam-run has your back in those situations.
I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.
I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!
Another NixOS user (and minor package maintainer, if it matters) here. Essentially, NixOS is actually rather simple to write a configuration file for a particular program once you get the knack for the nix language and learn how to workaround the sandboxing. I would actually consider it substantially less involved as compared to (for instance) creating your own Debian package.
However, getting to this point will take a bit of effort, and this step is more or less obligatory to use software on NixOS, whereas it generally isn’t (but still is a good idea) on other distributions.
(There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
“Learning curve” is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I’ve seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn’t help.
But I’ve tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn’t have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.
Don’t even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.
I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it’s the best way for reproducible environments I can share I’ve found.
While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks, which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.
No. Your understanding to Fedora Silverblue is wrong. I can just run rpm-ostree install package.name in Silverblue, like other Fedora spins. The small disadvantage is that I need to reboot to apply this update. (re-construct)
but doesn’t that result in new A/B snapshots, or something like that?
Well, you can call it snapshots, but there is no need to think about it. In most cases, the system points to the newest snapshot (deployment 0). If a rollback is needed, I can pin to the older deployments. When a major change is to be applied (Like bump Fedora version), I’d manually mark the current deployment as dont-auto-delete.
Sure, but I’d like to have a more seamless experience, i.e. not having to open/start any “containers” or something like that.
I never used toolbox in my Fedora Silverblue system. I feel that I can’t tell the difference between using Silverblue and the default Fedora spin
It depends on if the changes needs it or not. You can set a reboot flag on a given task and at the end the system will reboot, but if no reboot is needed then it will just make the change live.
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