Proposal: Convert the server to NixOS #128
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We currently use Arch which isn't great for servers. I propose we switch our OS to NixOS. This offers a number of benefits:
The downside is that this will take a lot of work and I don't have too much time to work on it currently. However we could try attempting this over the summer. Any thoughts?
This is a good idea. When I have more time I will take a deeper look into NixOS. I heard about it some months ago and find it very interesting.
Yeah, I might first test out NixOS by installing it on my laptop and gaining some experience with it, since it's definitely a unique distro that has its own quirks.
I did install Guix on my laptop once but I had some firmware issues.
Anyways, NixOS is amazing for multi-user setups, so I'm definitely going to have to look deeper into this. Nix on Arch is OK but not ideal, since we I don't think that has good desktop integration and we still need Flatpak for graphical apps.
I'm trying out NixOS on my laptop right now.
Alright, I took a closer look at this and I think it'll be an insane amount of work to convert our existing server to NixOS since many packages that we use aren't available yet for NixOS and we'll have to package them ourselves. The main motivation really for this proposal is so that ordinary users can very easily install packages. As for stability and maintainability, I think NixOS won't really make our lives easier since we'll also have to maintain some packages ourselves.
Our current solution is to use Nix for CLI apps and Flatpak for graphical stuff. Honestly, a switch to NixOS would only benefit us a little bit, mainly increased simplicity, but the amount of work needed is painful. I'm going to close this for now, and if you all have other opinions or would like to help out, just reopen this. In the meantime, I might play around with setting up NixOS on my laptop or making a NixOS container, but there's been too much work currently put into configuring the Arch server so the gain from NixOS isn't worth the pain.