Anything to learn from NixOS?

[rubyFeedback]

I had some computer issues in the last weeks/days. During this, I tried several distributions.

One I wanted to use was NixOS. I ended up abandoning it again, for various reason, but nonetheless NixOS has some really really nice ideas.

Basically you can describe the whole system via a few configuration files. This in itself is not great per se, but the configuration files are used to rebuild the system deterministically and in a reproducible manner. This includes for instance re-building grub.

This would be neat for GoboLinux too, e. g. manage multiple different kernels, without having to manually touch the grub config file, for instance. And to ensure certain packages are there, based on user wanting this or that. They could even easily build and re-build their .iso files with their own customized GoboLinux (just how SLAX had this).

We could then also share configurations and we can have, if a user opts in, also obtain information what works in a certain setup and what does not. People can share their configurations for different programs too, so not just in regards to compiling and installing something but, say, nvidia cards. Only one person has to solve something, everyone else could re-use this. And so on and so forth.

There are many more ideas here. I believe it may be useful for GoboLinux to incorporate at the least a few of them. it does not have to require of users to learn a whole new language such as nix, but it could help simplify managing GoboLinux for folks. We could also "tag" programs, such as games, and people could then, for instance, do something like (just syntax idea):

gobo --rebuild --tags=games, science, plasma # plasma for KDE

This could then automatically build a .iso based on various open source games + support for games (SDL etc...), for science-related libraries, for plasma (KDE), all in the same .iso. And so on.

We could also have a mega-build, a really FAT .iso with the latest and greatest software. This could also include gentoo eflags; not the same 1:1 but the idea, e. g. have various optimisations that are guaranteed to work based on users testing on their hardware (again, as opt-in, so no data mining if the user did not ok-it).

NixOS used read-only targets, which was annoying though. I could not use setup.rb to install local ruby addons because that would fail, due to the read-only setting. I understand that this is necessary for reproducible results, but I hated that part. Nonetheless, what NixOS does is also cool. Some useful ideas could probably be incorporated into GoboLinux eventually.