The Polyglot NixOS

I have to say that that "surprisingly simple" thing is happening more and more for me on NixOS as well.

Recently a customer wanted me to use Fedora (I never visited the RPM side of the world before), and after truly the worst installer I've ever used, the actually system was nice. I do like Cockpit.

But then I needed to install an initrd that would me unlock the full disk encryption via SSH (it's a remote headless box). It took me half a day and a forum post to get it to work. I wrote a full page of notes for next time. Then the Firewall: I hit a bug (plus user error) which left me wrestling with a non-existent Tailscale interface for a while (it warns you for non-existing interfaces, but not with only a case mismatch, it then lets you do everything as if the interface exists), but after some hours I was done setting the zones, another page of notes and commands to enter to get to the desired state.

These configurations are both 1 or 2 lines in a NixOS config file. And that "work" is now done for all my NixOS servers.

You could argue that NixOS hides a lot of complexity, but so do Dracut and Firewalld of course. Nix is difficult, it's a high level abstraction. But it also just a bunch of key-values, and write-once, deploy everywhere.

Something about this rubs me the wrong way. You can get completely different behaviour depending on which architecture you boot on.

> I thought this would bring some space savings, because files that are not binary code should be largely the same.

Those ternary blobs tend to be cross-platform, I hear.