I thought about posting notes on Syncthing but then I’d have to tangentially talk about NixOS. NixOS is my main Linux distribution atm but Nix/NixOS/Flakes are too hard to write about and I fear they’ve ventured too far into the realm of over–engineering.

What do I mean by over–engineering? An over–engineered tool is one where even the simplest use cases are non–obvious (to most people) and this can happen when it tries to do too many things with “specificity”. The overall concept is elegant though (explainable in lay terms) and can be applied in other contexts.

I feel sorta conflicted about my posted notes on nixops because shortly after that I discovered nixos-rebuild had remote deploys. Now nixos-rebuild itself is just a bash script and taking a peek inside is well, you know.. enlightening. There’s even a NixOS deployment tool written in just nix. I use nixos-rebuild…

nixos-rebuild switch \
  --target-host "nix@remote.host" \
  --build-host "localhost" \
  --no-build-nix

The nix packages collection has a neat library repository. A small nudge can make it completely standalone. Basically it allows experimenting quickly with configuration patterns for custom stuff without an expensive evaluation.

After daily driving NixOS and the Nix pm for almost three years, it feels like it’ll be simplified by entities external to the project. It’s still in that academic phase (don’t do this/that) and needs software engineering asap.

That usually involves reducing boilerplate ruthlessly while generalizing/capturing fundamental uses cases (setting implicit best current practices). It’s reminiscent of lxc just before docker arrived for the masses.

btw this blog is served to you by NixOS :-)