What's most amazing is how easy it is to switch kernels on NixOS as this article touched on. This prompted me to switch to Cachy kernels, and after some caching delay (apparently need to switch once before caches set) I was able to take advantage of a completely different OS's core strength. Truly the one OS to rule them all.
arikrahman
> we should be able to disable shipping Nix entirely, by setting nix.enable = false.
It was at this point I began to question the entire exercise. If you don't want nix to even be installed, do you really want NixOS at all?
It would probably be much simpler to just build an image from scratch with the packages you want, composed in the way you want them, rather than contort the NixOS "UX" to produce the image you want.
xyzzy_plugh
Hey, thanks, nice adventure! I will have a look. I'm trying to ditch Arch for NixOS and I'm starting from Distrobox probably. Super useful!
lordkrandel
That's how I manage all of my virtual machines: building an ISO from a NixOS config and booting it as a virtual machine. I'm going to take some time to see what bits of this I can copy to slim down my ISOs.
One additional benefit: I build all my software from source (by disabling the nix cache) so stripping out these extra programs will not only slim down my ISOs but it will also reduce the build time.
comments (5)
arikrahman
It was at this point I began to question the entire exercise. If you don't want nix to even be installed, do you really want NixOS at all?
It would probably be much simpler to just build an image from scratch with the packages you want, composed in the way you want them, rather than contort the NixOS "UX" to produce the image you want.
xyzzy_plugh
lordkrandel
One additional benefit: I build all my software from source (by disabling the nix cache) so stripping out these extra programs will not only slim down my ISOs but it will also reduce the build time.
craftkiller
Here's another good article on the topic
It's unfortunate that Perl and Python are core deps, as well as Bash
nylonstrung