They have resolved this exact problem. There is an “experimental” cli tool that fixes a lot of your complaints about nix-env, nix-channel, etc. Itcs wrapped together with “flakes”. This newer feature is a little different, and working with or without flakes segments the community AND the types of articles about nix, like this one.
As far as I know though, nixos related thing still have a bizarre set of commands, and even with flakes “nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade” is still how you switch configs.
And as far as installation goes, using nix-env -iA really is a bad practice. Thats installing something ad hoc like you would in any other package manager. That defeats the point of nixos, where your configuration file explicitly defines all the packages you need installed, and nothing else. Nix will remove any packages you didnt specify.
I’ve been very happy with OMV, for the short time I’ve been playing with it. Its FOSS and the web interface makes it very clear all the layers of abstraction you can use to manage a NAS. I highly recommend it.
And proxmox is good too, also FOSS (proxmox VE). I also has another slick web interface to manage stuff. I like the web interfaces because, albiet intimidating, it exposes alot of options available to me, which give me opportunities to research and understand how it works.
But I’m still working on getting everything with it set up, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt!
Thanks for sharing these feature. I run pihole but knew nothing about this. As my move my implementation to new hardware I’ll definitely be adding this.
Can you elaborate on update system? AppImage is just a format, right? Whereas flatpak is a format and an entire toolkit for downloading and running flatpaks.
I don’t know how much content there is to share, so you might be overflowing with things to talk about every week. But I fear that doing so much effort weekly could be unsustainable. I would suggest, or hope you consider, a less freqent blog/podcast, like every other week. I think this would be more modest, and easier to maintain. You wouldn’t need to change to title of the blog, either.
Anyway, this is an exciting project and I’m thankful for your work.
Can you elaborate more on deduplication? Is this a feature you setup, or does it sort of work out of the box? This is a new concept to me, but sounds incredibly useful, especially in that scenario.
Perhaps I’m guilty of good luck, but is the trade off of performance for reliability worth it? How often is reliability a problem?
As a different use case altogether, suppose I was setting up a NAS over a couple drives. Does choosing something with COW have anything to do with redundancy?
Maybe my question is, are there applications where zfs/btrfs is more or less appropriate than ext4 or even FAT?
In my experience, you still have your same path to your nix installed binaries in the distribox container, so you shouldnt even have to duplicate your configuration. I also dont suspect python dev to be that bad so long as you use venv or conda.
If you have ideas please let me know. I’m preparing to hop distros so I’m very tempted to ignore the problem, blame the old distro, and hope it doesn’t happen again :)