On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 12:18:08PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
It seems a little late to retitle this as being about NixOS, although I'm going to address that. But since I'm not retitling, first off: thanks everyone who replied about virtualization, this has been educational.
As for NixOS - after Jamon's mention of it a couple months ago, I played with it for a bit and wrote up a rough review at http://www.gilesorr.com/blog/nixos-review.html
Some points for those who don't bother to follow the link: - /bin/rm doesn't exist. "rm" does, and it's on the PATH, but imagine how many scripts that breaks. - vi isn't installed by default. this is a 838MB compressed image they provided, and they didn't include the POSIX standard browser? It's available as a package though. - if a package is installed at the system level, the package manager will still happily install the same package for an individual user.
Think about this last point: the user will now be using their own version of the package. System-wide security updates are totally out the window.
I see the flexibility NixOS offers, but I think the price is too high.
It is an interesting design that is trying to solve one problem, but does so by creating a bunch of other ones. It is not a tradeoff I would be willing to take. Certainly the problem it is trying to solve is not one that has ever really been an issue for me (the few times I have had a reason to use another version of something, I have installed it in a small chroot running an appropriate version of the distribution to run that version). -- Len Sorensen