E.g. for quick provisioning of containers or virtual machines, this is also to make sure the required directories always exist. In a normal distribution, /home already exists, so systemd-tmpfiles does nothing, but there are cases where you want to setup a standard directory structure and this is a declarative alternative to scripts with a lot of mkdir, chmod and chown.
The name systemd-tmpfiles is kind of historic at this point, but wasn’t changed due to backwards compatibility and all.
Not being able to Syu every 5 minutes and only being able to update once a day was the biggest challenge when I changed to NixOS
Interesting how similar our distro careers are. My switch was also after a long time (15 years). Wouldn’t go back to Arch. Still think it’s a good distro for what it’s trying to achieve.
Hey, I never said this is what people want, just that it is in fact a transferrable skill. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone just trying to get their machine running, but if you’re looking to gain some insight, is not the worst choice.
If you actually try to understand what’s happening, I think it’s one of the best ways to learn how a system is composed, at least if you install manually. What’s a partition, file system, what does mounting do, chroots, you name it.
I don’t use Arch anymore but still think it’s a great distro to learn the basics while still having the luxury of new binary packages. Manual Arch install abstracts basically nothing away from you, for better or for worse.
Currently on NixOS, I’d say while its engineering is better overall, the things you learn there are much more distribution-specific or maybe concept-specific and often not applicable to other distributions.
I guess there are also probably ways to install e.g. Debian manually, I’ve never seen instructions for it though as there was always the focus on the installer, and frankly I’m not a big fan of apt and all. It always seemed to be much more convoluted than pacman plus it does a lot of stuff for you, whether you want it or not was my impression.
Grandma choosing USE flags already, get that bloat outta here
What would that be? Microsoft Edge is a Chromium browser, it can’t do more with webpages than Chrome or any other of the bunch can.
Oh and Edge is available for Linux, so there’s that. Not that I’d use it…
I know you’re joking anyways, but I always cringe when I see that. There’s no need to invoke su there. If you want a root shell, use sudo -s or sudo -i depending on what kind of shell you want.
There’s a keepassxc-full package that comes with all the functionality. Anyhow, Debian does not have the concept of USE flags, these don’t make sense in a binary-based distribution.
NixOS: (1, 2) - You can define specific package versions but with the large repos I doubt there is much QA going on
It depends on the nixpkgs channel you use (I’m also using the term for flakes here, though technically these are then called inputs). The main channels, those being NixOS-stable whatever the current version is at the time and NixOS-unstable have a rather big set of packages that must be built successfully before users get updates, including the tests defined in the build system plus sometimes distribution-specific tests, though these are often rather simple, like start program and see if its port is open. Even more, when a library gets updated, all programs and other libraries depending on it get rebuilt as well, including all tests.
Now what if a package outside of that scope breaks? Most likely, your new configuration won’t build, so you’re stuck on an older but working configuration, or it does build, but something doesn’t work. But I’m the latter case, you can still choose to start the older working configuration.
Also the more complicated packages have very dedicated and capable maintainers from my experience, sure the smaller stuff is often updated mostly automatically with merge request created by bots and just the final merge approved by the maintainer, but the big infrastructure is usually tested quite well.
As a downside, this can sometimes lead to longer periods without updates when a lot of stuff has to get rebuilt and something doesn’t work (multiple days, but not weeks). You can then switch to another set in case the problematic packages don’t affect you, or just wait. However, saying there’s little QA is unfair, in fact from my experience there’s more QA in nixpkgs than in most distributions.
I don’t recommend NixOS to new users because it abstracts a lot of stuff away and makes use of mechanics that are helpful to understand first. But if you’re comfortable with Linux, NixOS is a great distribution that even on unstable works very well. Then again, it allows specific packages to depend on very specific versions of other packages, which is partially the reason you’d use a stable distribution.
I can’t tell if this is actual advice or irony
This is a fork or other form of replacement for nix as in the package manager. It does not replace NixOS, but can be used on NixOS and Darwin.
The folders actually do make sense.
Roaming: this data can be moved between machines in a domain if you have a roaming profile. E.g. go to another workstation and your browser configuration is the same? Means it’s in Roaming.
Local: this data will not be synchronized between machines when you roam. This could be your browser’s cache.
LocalLow: like local, but for applications that are “low integrity”, like Internet Explorer. These folders have special properties. https://helgeklein.com/blog/internet-explorer-in-protected-mode-how-the-low-integrity-environment-gets-created/
Yes! Apologies, didn’t proofread what my phone produced from swiping
NixOS has the best concept and even pioneered it, but whether its implementation and documentation is perfect is a topic for debate.
However, it’s been quite long since I had to fiddle with my config and as such, the downsides don’t really affect one on a daily basis. In fact, I recently reinstalled my machine to change the root filesystem and it was an absolute breeze. If not for secure boot, it would have been absolutely trivial, and with secure boot it was easy and convenient.
As such, I consider the pains an investment into system that runs much better down the road. Though I’d love it if these pains were reduced.
I’d personally advise against NixOS as a first distribution for that matter. It’s a great distribution, but if you want to understand the underlying mechanics, start with something where you interact with them, like Arch or whatever.
systemd has its own containers, so this is the implementation of that requirement; “virtual machines” might use this exact binary to create home, among other directories like srv and what not. Someone at one point probably said “we always need to create these when spinning up systems, maybe systems can provide a mechanism to do that for us?” and then it was implemented.
systemd-tmpfiles claims the following:
I rather think having a purge command was the issue here, at the very least it should print a big fat warning at what it does, better even list all affected files and directories. There’s no reason a normal user needs this and with the name of the binary, it’s totally misleading, which is an issue in these situations.