my Tech Thing of choice is programming and the thing about programming is that in well-written code, {everything your code is doing} is explicitly visible and usually organized in an easy-to-understand hierarchy. if you want to know how the parser works, look inside of the parser module and recurse until you find the specific function that does the thing that you’re interested in

but administrating a Linux system is not like that at all which is a big part of why I hate it. config files are scattered everywhere, there’s no easy way to figure out what’s installed or what’s running at any given time, and nothing is organized in any way that makes sense to me

so I think I can understand the appeal of NixOS just because it lets you turn your Linux config into a nicely-organized codebase instead of the vague low-level chaos of a thousand config files and 5 different package managers

also it seems like Linux organizes its files based on what type of file they are. for example there’s a directory that contains every logfile for every program on the system, and there’s another that contains every executable for every program on the system. and I really prefer the Windows approach of having one directory per program instead of one directory per type of file. that way I can say “I’m interested in neovim” and go into my neovim directory and see every file related to neovim all at once. and I think that’s roughly how NixOS works too

with that being said, I am not learning NixOS lol I would hate every second of that. I want my operating system to Just Work with as little tinkering as possible

@kasdeya it's how NixOS works *in the config* but if you don't have the config it becomes even worse "everything is scattered everywhere" because now it's a million tiny folders in the nix store, and there's somehow like six copies of each config file, and figuring out which ones are in use and which aren't is kind of a mess

also home manager makes this even trickier to follow

so yeah, NixOS helps just don't lose the source config

@tempest @kasdeya how would you lose the source config

@40796c19 @kasdeya we do remote deployments to servers and are pretty sure that doesn't actually copy the original nixos module files to the target, just the resulting system derivation, so it's not out of the question to imagine someone could do something similar and then lose their config repo