>I have notes on how I did stuff, if necessary. I used to keep ansible playbooks but they were just an overkill. Does it even make sense to write a playbook for a system that I'll reinstall in three or four years ? Probably not.
Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years?
Folks applying the Ansible mindset to NixOS are missing the point. NixOS is *not like a runbook*. It's declarative, it's prescriptive, it's not some god-forsaken state machine that tries to paper over the horrors of modern computing. It IS the definition of my computers, not some glorified pile of scripts and conditional checks encoded in fking jinja. The same as it's been mostly for 8 years now.
> Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years?
Still useless. Software change, the configs i make today might not make sense or even work in 3-5 years.
Nix and stuff (ansible etc) only make sense if you have to reinstall your systems multiple times in a single week (fine if your hobby is reinstalling linux on your laptop).
But if you do a full reinstall once every five years then it’s largely an exercise in futility.
Which part? Like, that's what NixOS is. My config repo is declarative, describes in its history every machine I've owned. You could rebuild them at any point in time and get an identical exact machine image out.
Idk, this is why it's hard to talk about nix with people that think they know it but then also openly doubt things that you will one day take for granted if you take the time to learn it.
Yea, sure, except what if the one-time configuration was in a Nix file that will continue being exactly as useful for years?
Folks applying the Ansible mindset to NixOS are missing the point. NixOS is *not like a runbook*. It's declarative, it's prescriptive, it's not some god-forsaken state machine that tries to paper over the horrors of modern computing. It IS the definition of my computers, not some glorified pile of scripts and conditional checks encoded in fking jinja. The same as it's been mostly for 8 years now.