It's rare that I praise a bitcoin magazine article these days, but this one is worth reading. There has been some discussion on SN in the past about running a node on NixOS. I have been using it for the past 6 months, but haven't switched my node to it yet. I found it tough getting used to Nix at first. I'm pretty much a Linux novice anyway. After a short time I discovered its logic and simplicity. It's now my go to distro. One thing is true, though. Updates can take forever.
Seems a bit mad to use a source distro just for running some servers if you aren't doing dev/testing work with them as well and need 3, 4, ...6 different bleeding edge things installed at the same time. I used Gentoo for a while and it was fun during those days when GCC didn't do a good job in stock default settings for optimisation for memory, size and speed. Now, there's hardly any point, it mostly optimizes best for each things workload type.
If you like to be bleeding edge IMO the best for newbies is Manjaro. If you need a stable environment, Ubuntu 20.04, KDE or Gnome choose your poison (or budgie or xfce etc). If you want to run several servers, Ubuntu's multipass is looking pretty cool for jumping from a VM image to a deployed server, all of them able to be hot swapped and all that fun stuff.
The only glitch with Ubuntu 20 as a daily driver for me was its Git version predates SSH signing but with a newer version source code built and installed the rest of the system is great. Later versions of Ubuntu, and, basically everything involving Gnome and GTK is a mess and it's only just starting to look sane again with this year's release.
NixOS lets operators pick how bleeding edge they want. In a release you will get compiled packages. If you pick a rolling release channel you will get compiled packages if they are cached, or it will be built from source if there is no cache from the Hydra build system.
All the configs are on our git repo if you want to try and install it on your own hardware. The configs are not set up for a raspberry pi only x86. You will also need an internal hard drive 2TB or more with the proper labeling and file system.
I've started before Umbrel (at least it wasn't widely known back then). It's a hobby project. Since it's a Raspberry Pi it's quite slow to do nixos-rebuild switch and UX would probably improve if I used RaspiBlitz, Umbrel or sth. But if you have to deploy multiple nodes to some cloud provider Nix really shines.
NixOS is a great Linux distribution but idea is more that this approach replaces your other "DevOps configuration management tooling" (terraform, ansible, puppet, chef etc). Beside the reproducible builds and great caching through Cachix.
I've written unit tests against the declarative state of a node. So your pipeline can for instance fail if service X is not configured to be running or that server doesn't have user Y (all without actually having to connect to the server). And then you can have another step / automated process that syncs and applies the stuff to the server. Total GitOps :)
My main pain point was actually packaging software that requires nodejs (like RTL). Nowadays it's much easier since a lot of stuff is already in nixpkgs and also documentation got better.
Nix seems incredible. I am on Kubuntu and just got into Linux as my primary OS. After about a year I finally got through most of the major pain in using Linux as a desktop. It is very quirky to say the least.
I saw a video recently on Nix and how it is basically a monolitic config that the OS builds from which contains all the OS related config and apps you want installed permanently. I really love this idea of a singular config the OS just rebuilds itself from. It is like having a docker compose file.
I have considered switching. Is it worth switching to Nix as a primary desktop OS? I need to be able to do some unusual things which Linux has a tough time with already such as wine for some audio apps and steam proton.
It feels like Nix is fundamentally different from learning a traditional Linux system. Mentally is that how I should approach it?
ok so, Nix is not NixOS. You can use Nix as a package manager on any OS and get familiar from there. Would def recommend that before moving to NixOS as your distro, especially if you're new to linux.
been running nix-bitcoin for a while now, and it's been good. I think it's actually easier than most diy nodes because building a nix-bitcoin node means filling out a declarative config--basically a form--instead of a sequence of commands and procedures.
When someone wraps the config and options in a nice UI we'll be cookin...
nixos-rebuild switchand UX would probably improve if I used RaspiBlitz, Umbrel or sth. But if you have to deploy multiple nodes to some cloud provider Nix really shines.