add "nixos subjectively"
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title: "Nixos Subjectively"
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date: 2023-08-31T08:30:14+03:00
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Previously I [bloggged]({{< ref "log/2023/end-of-summer.md" >}}) about the cool
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things I did with NixOS. After publishing the post, my friend promptly asked:
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> Wondering what's your professional take on NixOS. Would you give it a short
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> for a small-to-medium size server fleet provisioning? It felt rather involved
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> and not very mature when I looked at it. Kind of a commitment, too.
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Here is my response:
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My journey to NixOS has been bumpy ride: it's been over a year since I looked
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at first, and I still sometimes feel I did not escape the beginner level. The
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learning curve is steep, and it is best to take it on gently or have a good
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mentor nearby. I started by installing NixOS on my primary laptop, which was a
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mistake. The annoyance of "I can do this in Debian in 5 seconds, and I am an
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hour in without an end of sight in this thing" was very discouraging at times.
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I reinstalled my laptop back to Debian and took a few slow months to provision
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2 personal servers (the thing that's detailed in the blog). Taking it slow has
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been fantastic experience. The folks in Matrix are very helpful where
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documentation, especially high-level, is patchy. Now I feel comfortable enough
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to retry NixOS on my laptop again.
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Recently I realized that what I originally perceived as immaturity later turned
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out lack of knowledge and/or lack of high-level documentation. Technicals are
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good. Granted, I have found some bugs (though trivially [fixed][nixos-prs]),
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but they mostly come from the power to configure it and thus the huge surface
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area. Also, variety does not help: for example, there are [10 deployment
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tools][deployment-tools] in the wiki ("nixops related" counts too). It is hard
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to choose when I don't know what to expect, much less know what's possible. It
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is also nontrivial to ask for a "high-level" advice: a beginner will just tell
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their favorite system, not knowing the trade-offs or alternatives. An expert
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will tell "depends on what you want to do". Moving beyond such answer requires
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time and a beverage, which brings it's own constraints. In this concrete case,
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I spent quite some time learning krops, which later turned out to be a
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dead-end. Later moved to deploy-rs, which turned out to be a good decision so
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far.
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As far as recommendations go. For smaller companies, especially where
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developers are also taking care of operations/deployments/infrastructure, I
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can't recommend NixOS enough. For medium-large size companies it would
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certainly bring a lot of value (I can already see how many things mine or my
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sister-team at Uber had to re-implement which come out of the box in NixOS),
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but, like with anything that has a different paradigm, requires a mentality
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shift, which may be very hard organizationally.
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There is at least one large-ish company I know that uses NixOS
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([proof][canva]). I did not look, I found it by accident. I also know a few
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folks in Tweag; their primary consulting stream is helping companies onboard to
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Bazel and/or Nix. They won't tell who they are, but there are "quite a few, of
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different sizes, flying under the radar".
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[nixos-prs]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Amotiejus+is%3Aclosed
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[deployment-tools]: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Applications#Deployment
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[canva]: https://opencollective.com/canvaofficial/expenses/115338
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