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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Nix/Silverblue users: How big is the advantage if you already have 100% automated your deployments via Ansible? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by wolf@lemmy.zip to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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There is a similar question on the site which must not be named.

My question still has a little different spin:

It seems to me that one of the biggest selling points of Nix is basically infrastructure as code. (Of course being immutable etc. is nice by itself.)

I wonder now, how big the delta is for people like me: All my desktops/servers are based on Debian stable with heavy customization, but 100% automated via Ansible. It seems to me, that a lot of the vocal Nix user (fans) switched from a pet desktop and discover IaC via Nix, and that they are in the end raving about IaC (which Nix might or might not be a good vehicle for).

When I gave Silverblue a try, I totally loved it, but then to configure it for my needs, I basically would have needed to configure the host system, some containers and overlays to replicate my Debian setup, so for me it seemed like too much effort to arrive nearly at where I started. (And of course I can use distrobox/podman and have containerized environments on Debian w/o trouble.)

Am I missing something?

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[–] mogoh@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 months ago (7 children)

I use Fedora Silverblue and in my experience the updates are very stable. But with Debian and Ansible automation I think you are not missing a much, maybe nothing at all.

Would you mind sharing how you automated your setup with Ansible or generally how to use Ansible in that way? I use some bash scripts for my automation and it is a bit hacky, so if I could improve that, it would be nice.

[–] XenGi@lemmy.chaos.berlin 6 points 9 months ago

The thing about ansible is to always remember that it really is just a backup python script that gets copied to your server and executed. Yes it works quite well, but you have to be careful to not have break on you.

For me the difference to nix is, that my bud expression will actually always produce the same output or tell me it can't. Instead of ansible which will fail after some updates went past.

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