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

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by wolf to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Silverblue doesn't solve the same problems as Nix, or Ansible for that matter. I built my own in the past and it was non-trivial - although the CI process could pair quite nicely with Ansible. IMHO the primary advantage of Silverblue is that updates are a download, with practically zero work to do after the download has completed (this is a very big deal for RPM-based systems because an update boot can take a long time).

As for Ansible vs Nix, try switching from one program to another across all your machines. It's doable but not fun. Now try switching back across all your machines. Nix makes your system equal a configuration, it does not add configuration.