[GTALUG] Virtualized OSes

Giles Orr gilesorr at gmail.com
Thu Apr 23 16:18:08 UTC 2015


On 23 April 2015 at 10:34, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 05:43:27PM -0400, ted leslie wrote:
>> I am thinking of moving off Debian/Mint-DE, to Nixos linux for this type of
>> flexibility.
>
> Of course you trade it for the annoyance of being not compatible with
> any standard linux binary.  Everything ahs to be wrapped in environment
> settings to find the ld-linux.so and otehr things, because NOTHING is
> in the places that they are supposed to be.
>
> So interesting design, but it comes at the expense of total
> incompatibility with everything that already exists.  It can be worked
> around though.

It seems a little late to retitle this as being about NixOS, although
I'm going to address that.  But since I'm not retitling, first off:
thanks everyone who replied about virtualization, this has been
educational.

As for NixOS - after Jamon's mention of it a couple months ago, I
played with it for a bit and wrote up a rough review at
http://www.gilesorr.com/blog/nixos-review.html

Some points for those who don't bother to follow the link:
- /bin/rm doesn't exist.  "rm" does, and it's on the PATH, but imagine
how many scripts that breaks.
- vi isn't installed by default.  this is a 838MB compressed image
they provided, and they didn't include the POSIX standard browser?
It's available as a package though.
- if a package is installed at the system level, the package manager
will still happily install the same package for an individual user.

Think about this last point: the user will now be using their own
version of the package.  System-wide security updates are totally out
the window.

I see the flexibility NixOS offers, but I think the price is too high.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com


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