this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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More nixOS development. It's the reproducible builds on the OS scale, one configuration file that will always generate exactly the same system when run, and you can update and rebuild from that file without restarting the system in most cases. This should make triangulating and fixing distro issues much easier, as well as making a distro easier to maintain from the user side.
Wait, it's like docker, but for entire OS with packages, configuration and stuff like that?
Yes, and every package specifically defines the exact version of its libraries that it needs and the system symlinks everything together package by package, so there's no chance than an update will break something further upstream. The configuration file also controls things like MySQL configuration and user permissions so you can get literally the exact same system. I think even docker doesn't control for library versions with its regular configuration.
EDIT: And it keeps older versions of the configuration file and its symlink arrangement around, so if something goes wrong, you can reboot the machine and select an older version from the bootloader.
Definitely docker (well, let's say containers) control the library version, if you didn't build the image specifically not to do that (e.g. fetching dependencies at runtime, which is generally a bad practice and not the default).
However, at build time if you use things like "apt install ..." You will get different versions depending on when you build the image, but once the image is built, you have always the same software inside. Obviously it is very different from nix as they serve very different purposes (one day I will find the motivation to switch to nixOS!).
Wow, that's great! I'm not sure if I need those features, but I'll check NixOS out, thanks
Better than Docker in terms of reproducibility. While Docker containers are usually more or less reproducible, Docker images are not as the Dockerfiles depend on lots of external state such as the repositories of the distro used as a base image. This is also partially true for NixOS, but it's far more realistic to pin a version of nixpkgs (the Nix(OS) repository) than do the same with Debian repositories. The new Flake format even provides a way to pin nixpkgs by default.