[Nix-dev] few questions before migrating from Debian…

[Saša Janiška]

Hello,

for some time I’m considering which Linux distro to use to have
relatively fresh packages as well as not to waste too much time for
admin work.

Morever, it would be ideal to have same distro for the machine of my
relative’s to make it easier during trouble.shooting session. So, in
order to fulfill those two requirements I did consider to stay with
Debian (Sid) on my desktop and netbook machines, but put Debian Stable
on the machines of my relatives.

However, after checking about NixOS which I tried many years ago, I’ve
concluded it’s the best option at the moment since I learnt that
nixos-stable might be good-enough for other’s machine requiring not much
admin time, while I can use nixos-unstable if stable channel is not
fresh–enough for my own needs.

So, before jumping to install on real hardware - today I did install
under vbox, I’ve few questions…

My desktop is i7 2.8G/16G machine having 1xTB+1x2TB disks which are
assembled in btrfs raid1 with / and /home as btrfs subvolumes (the
remaining 1TB is used for daily backups.)

I’m delighted that NixOS provides ZFS as filesytem option since it was
one of the reasons why I was evaluating Free/PC-BSD option in the past.

a) do you, in general, recommend using ZFS over Btrfs for NixOS desktop
machine?

b) is ZFS good option even for single-disk netbook machine with 4G of
memory?

c) can one use ZFS on root *without* usage of separate /boot partition?
I use same disk layout on Debian, but with btrfs and do not have any
experience with ZoL, although I’ve found that there is
’boot.loader.grub.zfsSupport’ option?

Any doc/tutorial explaining how to do such install?

I’ve found: https://gist.github.com/vizanto/7374277 but wonder if it is
still relevant?

There are of course few packages I do miss in NixOS, but everything else
is so great, so that I’m very enthusiastic to put NixOS on all my
relative’s  machines very soon.

On all machines, I plan to use GNOME3, so wonder if there are some
gotchas in regard - someone on #nixoes mentioned that GTK does not like
custom paths as used by Nix and recommended i3 instead which is, atm,
not option considering that other family members also use my machine and
relatives are not savvy-enough for that tiling wm.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities,
one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without
attachment one attains the Supreme.