Same here. Reproducible configuration is amazing. Even a moderately complex app like Forgejo is easy to set a Nix module up for, with all the needed nginx/database/backup/etc. config nailed down and easily transferable to another machine if need be.

Coming back to Nix (and Linux in general) this year has been an absolute pleasure.

Not because it's suddenly got better, but because the learning curve has collapsed to a flat line. My problem with linux has always been how un-user friendly it is. Constant tinkering around with config files and googling how to fix problems. Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.

Personally I prefer ansible plus I can easily manage multiple machines but this is a little but different use case. I have 5 micro PC like orange pi, Raspberry pi, radxa... so I prefer to bootstrap them from I laptop with a single command in am event of failure

Also everything is running in kubernetes isolation so my OS is immutable and consume much less disk space than NixOS (I don't have too much of it and future is looking bleak in this department)

Same for me. I have an agent generate the Nix and a tightened systemd unit for it, and off it goes. If I later want to remove it, I just throw it out of the config.

If you’re curious about FreshRSS please also evaluate miniflux. A fraction of the resource consumption and a better overall experience IMO.

Miniflux homepage really undersells it.

A lot of folks have been praising the harmony of Claude code + nixOS. For those of you doing this, I would recommend you to ask your agent to switch your config to nix flakes. It's a much better paradigm for working with the versioning than the default channels interface. Additionally, you should ask your agent to look into home manager, if it hasn't done so already.

I don't want to bore my HackerNews fellows, so I'm sorry in advance, but wasn't there a lot of drama in the Nix community? I've read some time ago that a private company was buying parts of its infrastructure (or something like that) and forcing some changes upstream and people were not happy about it.

I'm interested in NixOS, but I'm at an age where I just want things to stay stable and change only when they really have to. I already have a lot of big mandatory changes from life itself, I don't need more :)

I'm writing this in good faith. I'm genuinely curious and interested in trying it again.

How do you configure the backups with NixOS? Didn't see that explained in the article at all

    services.restic.backups.my_repo.paths = [ config.services.freshrss.dataDir ];

> I dislike maintaining side projects. That includes my own code, but also self-hosted services developed by someone else. I’m okay with a few minutes of maintenance here and there, but having to schedule hours of uninterrupted work to upgrade something, or spending any amount of time at all on emergency maintenance, really kills my desire to work with computers.

I've struggled with the same problem, and Coolify helped me with it. It supports auto-deployment from GitHub via a bot integration, so you don't have to manage Github Actions. It can also deploy from a Docker Compose file, which is good for self-hosting other people's projects.

Of course you still have to have a list of instructions on how to set up your server with Coolify. But at least it's a finite set of instructions, meaning you don't have to update it every time you host a new project.

im sure nixos is fantastic but honestly i just love arch so much i cant imagine ever using anything else.

Giving your LLM a copy of nixpkgs and a nix executable is really great for getting something workable

RSS feeds are getting rare now days. Thankfully, Google News still has a very robust and useful RSS feed.

I have a container running on GGoogle Cloud Run within the free tier. It runs runs twice weekly as well as once a month (for monthly news summary) to parse through specifically setup Google News RSS feeds and then trigger an email with key news items I'm specifically interested.

Gemini is used for determining which articles to include and exclude from the email summary based on my predefined criteria. It works really well in being able to keep on top of specific industry/tech news I'm interested in.

> two builds from the same Dockerfile separated by time can result in rather different container images

This is true, and the same is true of shell scripts, but isn't it true of nix as well? If you update nixpkgs and then install something, you have the same chance of getting a new version of it as you do with the `sudo apt-get install` in the Dockerfile, no? I had once looked into using nix to intentionally install older versions of software and it was not as easy as I had hoped.

9 or 20 lines of nixos vs 7 steps on another OS vs some copy/paste with docker. It's not very convincing

> NixOS ad or Claude Code ad

Can never tell with these submissions.

Similar here, but I'm running rootless podman containers in Guix like this:

  (oci-container-configuration
        (environment
         '("CRON_MIN=2,32"
           "LISTEN=0.0.0.0:80"
           "OIDC_ENABLED=0"))
        (image "freshrss/freshrss:edge")
        (log-file (container-log "freshrss"))
        (extra-arguments
         '("--pod=freshrss"))
        (provision "freshrss")
        (respawn? #t)
        (volumes
         '("...")))

While i admire the nix community i don't know how people can be spending their time on it to solve the types of problems they are, when AI is shitting out bad python code quicker than anyone can keep up with that's degrading all our systems. By one token you can argue that's a way of fighting back, but maybe also a possible way to bury your head in the sand while the rest of the world burns around you.