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#nixos

102 posts81 participants10 posts today
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@janl The purpose is to warn bystanders to invest in technological #complexity that seems to be very attractive for its advanced features without acknowledging the risks or efforts associated.

Its learning curve doesn't even allow for an easy start.

As with so many awesome tools, this is something for specific experts and not for new/occasional/advanced users.

BTDT and I've had my fair share of bad experiences.

Current pain in my setup: #NixOS. Instead of providing an abstraction layer to keep away certain OS setup & maintenance problems for good, I got into so many little & bigger troubles that I try to tell people only to use it when they are ready to invest its required learning effort all the way.

From my point of view, this also holds true for "advanced" file systems like #ZFS, #XFS, ... YMMV.

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hmm this #nixOs update is taking a while, let me look at what it's doing

"Running phase: buildPhase
no Makefile or custom buildPhase, doing nothing"

Ahh ok, take your time I guess

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This #nixos impermanence setup, and lovely thunder storm by Lord Thor makes me feel all pagan and #zen. I've always been fascinated by the Buddhist concept. And I can see why. Don't worry. If something fucks up, it's not permanent. Whether it's #linux or #life. Just reboot.

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My #nixos switch to a zen state of impermanence went off without a hitch! My NixOS fu is getting so good. I love it. But I am going to setup a #guix VM to play with that too. When I get time. #linux

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@peter_mcarthur totally agree!

I'm certainly no lawyer, and have no personal experience/knowledge of the software or it's authors - I purely saw a link, opened it and was surprised that visually it looks so like the official #NixOS website.

Hopefully someone at @nixos_org is already on this?

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Just stumbled over this....

Is it just me, or does the branding not seem somewhat ... problematic?

Despite it's appearance (inc use of the logo) looking incredibly similar to the official website, and as far as I can tell - it doesn't have any "official" affiliation with #NixOS

That's without touching on the fact this is entirely AI oriented - which is a very "marmite" like product to put it mildly...

mcp-nixos.io/

MCP-NixOS - Model Context Protocol for NixOS
MCP-NixOSMCP-NixOS | Model Context Protocol for NixOSMCP resources and tools for NixOS packages, system options, Home Manager configuration, and nix-darwin macOS configuration.
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@itsfoss

I have to say traditional LTS distros. After doing big manual server upgrades for some decade, no more LTS expiration dread!

Next to go will be my arch desktop as I find #nixos fits my desktop and server needs way better.

A disclaimer would be that NixOS is non standard. Documentation is lacking and knowledge of the Nix language is required for advanced configuration.

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Ok #linux and #nixos peeps, I have a puzzle.

I want this systemd service to run ONLY WHEN a user is logged in, and they're connected to the internet.

Is this possible?

This is what I have so far but when I restart the computer, the systemd service shows as failed because it's trying to send the notification when no one is logged into the system.

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Hey #NixOS #Cloudflare #ZeroTrust

I was trying to install cloudflared from unstable repo. It installed and works from 24.11, but when I ran the command to create the credentialsFile it complained about the older version and suggested upgrading to 2025.4.0 rather than the 2024.10.0 that is in nixos.

Unstable has 2025.2.1, which is better, but is not 2025.4.0. Two branching questions from here.

1 - the unstable package returned that error: Package ‘cloudflared-2025.2.1’ in /nix/store/vxwsnfg5mys9v1qrxvim13ddmnhd4z1g-unstable/unstable/pkgs/applications/networking/cloudflared/default.nix:97 is marked as broken, refusing to evaluate.

Conveniently, it included instructions for allowing packages marked broken through. Is that considered normal in dealing with Cloudflare on NixOS? Cause it reads to me like an outtake from "How To Get Your Website Pwned By L33t H4krz".

2 - considering that even if I allow the "broken" package in, I'm still not getting the version recommended by cloudflared's error message, perhaps there's a flake or something I should try, that would get the daily build or whatever?

I'm off to do more searches and maybe poke my head into one of the actual support forums, but this seems like a pretty common task for NixOS admins to be doing, so it's probably an easy answer that I just haven't found yet.

Probably been looking at nixos.wiki again or something.

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@jpmens ❤️ GPG agent forwarding with a Yubikey!

I've been using this method for a while now to control sudo authentication on my local machine, and all remote devices/VMs too. Allows me to leave an undesirably long/complex password for the user account in a password manager (as an escape hatch, but which I don't actually use).

With verification of presence via touch, and also the PIN on the Yubikey cached for only a short period of time, and it self destructing after 3 incorrect PIN entries...

End result is I have super convenient *and* secure local/remote two factor authentication and privelidge escalation.

I'm also using sudo-rs, which is a much more "minimal" implementation - just as I don't need the vast array of extra stuff that bundled into the traditional version.

I use #NixOS almost entirely, so only have need for Ansible in a few places...

That said, finding a way to utilize this for Ansible Vault has been on my to-do list for a while, so looks like you've solved that one for me!

Thank you 🙏