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

[Online Touch | Danny Wilson]

ZFS is the best :-)

My gist ( https://gist.github.com/vizanto/7374277 ) is still relevant. With slight modifications you don’t need a separate /boot filesystem since recent Grub can read ZFS filesystems (mirrors, not sure about RAID-Z) just fine.
Basically just skipping the partitioning steps and creating a whole disk zpool.

A few months ago I've installed NixOS on ZFS root (mirrored disks) so I know it’s possible.


Cheers,
Danny


On 9 apr. 2016, at 21:07, Saša Janiška <gour at atmarama.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
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