NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer

NixOS as the Linux distribution built around the unique Nix package manager is out with its first release of the year...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NixOS-22.05-Released

[flower]

I don't really understand why every linux distribution needs a gui install.
Esp with nixos. It's strength is the config file. Everyone who is capable of editing and understanding it's language is clearly capable of partitioning and installing it himself.

A gui installer makes sense for ubuntu fedora and suse though

[c117152]

I don't really understand why every linux distribution needs a gui install.
Esp with nixos. It's strength is the config file. Everyone who is capable of editing and understanding it's language is clearly capable of partitioning and installing it himself.

A gui installer makes sense for ubuntu fedora and suse though

It's the other way around: Since the abstraction of the many configuration formats and routines in linux (and all OSs really) requires a Turing complete language, your best bet for putting together a GUI installer is to target that layer with a visual programming language interface of sorts.
That said, nixpkgs is all hairy bash wrapping so it doesn't really apply in practice.

[Robert Hensing]

your best bet for putting together a GUI installer is to target that layer with a visual programming language interface of sorts..

In NixOS we use what's called the module system to program the logic that mediates between simple configuration options and the messy world of configuration files. A graphical configuration tool then only has to worry about those simple (data) configuration options.
Sure, if you want to do something custom, you need to write such a module in the Nix programming language, but there's already a ton of options (example) out there that just need to be filled in with simple values.
This is the kind of thing that the unofficial nix-gui does.

That said, nixpkgs is all hairy bash wrapping so it doesn't really apply in practice.

I'm not going to say nixpkgs' scripts are pretty, but they're really an implementation detail, especially as they run in the sandbox, unable to do system-level or even user-level stuff and only able to access the dependencies you give them. This is really as good as it gets given the fact that scripts are kind of unavoidable for packaging.

[Kemosabe]

I don't really understand why every linux distribution needs a gui install.
Esp with nixos. It's strength is the config file. Everyone who is capable of editing and understanding it's language is clearly capable of partitioning and installing it himself.

A gui installer makes sense for ubuntu fedora and suse though

Last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever about the language.

[Robert Hensing]

Last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever about the language.

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/expressions/expression-language.html

[flower]

Last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever about the language.

the properties are explained very well. the language itself sadly isn't - but a gui installer doesnt help with that at all.

i am currently switching my homelab to nixos. and it certainly is doable with the available documentation.

[blackiwid]

Last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever about the language.

I think the problem is not the lack of documentation of the language, but that the language is so alien strange and complicated that you physically can't write a easy documentation for it.

That's the major reason why I think Guix in the long run has potential to be a semi-nixos killer.

I mean as pure User of the distribution it does not really matter, but try to write or modify packages is a pain in the ass in nixos. the Nix language is probably the most difficult language I ever encountered, as normal fortran style language user (C, Python, Java...) it's easier to learn Haskell than the nix language.
It's such a weird inbred language of some apparently crazy sysadmins that's really painful. Of course setting a few variables in the config is easy but everything beyond that is hell on earth.

[Ermine]

Why does the picture show Plasma Desktop if XFCE is chosen?

[Mordrag]

Why does the picture show Plasma Desktop if XFCE is chosen?

Aksing the real questions here .
I really hope nix flakes will become the default in 22.11, I remember that it was kinda a pita when i started using nixos to change from the default configuration.nix
to flakes.
Other than that I think the gui lowers the bar of some users to even try nixos, so I think thats a good thing.