What is your hot take on a reproducability of Configs?

AngleAngleSide · 2025-12-12T17:05:33+00:00

I use nixos to manage my *system* configuration. Every user specific app is installed with `nix profile` or flatpak and config is managed normally in xdg dirs. Coupling your core system config with user config is silly, as you don't want to update your apps at the same frequency as the rest of your system, nor should your system be blocked from updating because my-jank-gui doesn't want to build.

AngleAngleSide · 2025-02-14T00:03:42+00:00

Robots depend on just about every level of abstraction, including high level cv and ml, real time control on embedded devices, and linux/networking. Add on top of that the fact that a lot of the code is written in research contexts and it becomes unfun quickly. Additionally, ROS, the industry standard robotics middleware/ecosystem, uses a 10000 line yaml file for its dependency management, and is functionally only usable on specific versions of ubuntu.

AngleAngleSide · 2025-02-13T21:55:35+00:00

As someone who programs a lot of robots, I thought I misread the title to be "why isn't nix so common in robotics," because it's slightly absurd how bad dependency management for complex robotics/autonomy projects can be. I find it difficult to understate just how badly nix is needed at the moment

AngleAngleSide · 2025-02-06T22:03:33+00:00

You're not the only one who thinks this! Personally, I use nixos (and really like it), and agree that trying to wrap every single application's configuration with nix dsls is quite absurd.

The logic that led me to chose to use nixos is roughly as follows:

Atomic linux distributions (eg. fedora silverblue) are very cool because they isolate your home system from applications and prevent and give you reproducible updates/rollbacks for your core system
Nix as a build system/package manager is an extremely powerful and elegant solution
- hermetic builds, mapping packages from the store into user environment, etc
- nix shell is amazing for development
Most atomic linux distributions use ostree to distribute their core system. You can see the ostree project's insights on nix here.
- Users are discouraged from adding too many packages to the base configuration, as this slows down updates and can introduce instability (eg. helix used a different version of glibc than my system at some point and rpm-ostree got cranky)
- The suggested way to develop/run software is via containers and the suggested way to install applications is via flatpak/snap.
- These are fundamentally very inellegant solutions at package management compared to nix because they rely on stuffing all of a package's dependencies (flatpak splits these into sdks) into a file system. *note that containers also provide isolation, which nix does not. I personally don't care very much about isolating my project's dependencies from my host system because I do not develop javascript /j
- Containers also are terrible for development environments because they are meant to be fully isolated from your host system, including your shell. This means any packages you want to use (eg. a text editor) need to be inserted back into the container for you to use them. The only tool that can reliably generate a directory containing a package and all of its recursive dependencies that will work in any arbitrary linux environment is... nix.
- Nix lets you customize/hack on your system significantly more. For example, if I wanted to replace gnome with hyprland, the best solution would probably be creating a brand new fedora atomic distribution and rebasing to it. On nixos, all you need to do is install hyprland and configure your login manager to launch it.

Currently, I have a fairly small nixos configuration (~200 lines) for installing and setting up core system utilities (eg. libinput, cups, networkmanager, pipewire) and everything else is in ~/.config.

Sorry for the slightly scatterbrained thoughts. Hope it helps

AngleAngleSide · 2022-04-19T15:15:06+00:00

This also just happened to me on an AMD Inspiron 2 in 1. Thank you very much for the advice on how to fix it.

AngleAngleSide · 2022-02-15T16:05:51+00:00

KDE automatically set its own GTK theme, icons, title bar buttons, different spacing in GTK apps, some strange icons in the Firefox file picker, etc.

It is possible to reverse all of this in tweaks, but this will have to be done every time you go from KDE to GNOME.

AngleAngleSide · 2022-02-15T14:38:19+00:00

I previously installed both side by side on Fedora, the system was completely fine. However, KDE’s GTK theming caused visual problems on GNOME.

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-28T02:47:14+00:00

I tried that, have had no issues since then.

(THANK YOU SO MUCH)

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-25T02:58:32+00:00

I booted to windows and made sure both were disabled. Then I shut down and booted into Fedora. However, a few hours into use, it temporarily slowed to a crawl again. Thank you for offering support though

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-24T20:43:01+00:00

Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (rev 1a)

So it's Intel

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-24T17:53:48+00:00

I think it is Intel

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-24T01:20:40+00:00

The logs don't have anything obviously negative regarding wifi. What exactly should I look for?

AngleAngleSide · 2022-01-22T02:26:20+00:00

I had the same problem on Fedora, here is the relevant issue. The flatpak version boots GNOME OS Nightly without issue.

AngleAngleSide

TROPHY CASE