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?

  • folkrav
    2·
    9 months ago

    I don’t know of anyone with a modicum of experience with cloud solutions that would pretend it is making anything “simpler” lol

    The only closed parts of Docker are Docker Desktop, which isn’t required at all, and Docker Hub, which is a repo like any other. You can load images from anywhere. It’s hard to take anything you say regarding container technology seriously if you seriously think VMs & Ansible/Chef/Puppet really answers the same problems as lightweight containers.

    MS did take some language servers and relicensed them, yes. Other language servers still exist, and the LSP protocol is still open, and used in many other editors.

    This reads like “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal”, minus the tongue in cheek tone…

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      You just missed the point. There are always alternatives, generally not as good and unlike before all tooling is now hostage of some big provider.

      • folkrav
        1·
        9 months ago

        Feel free to point where I missed the point, cause I don’t see it. Outside these “functions as a service” things like Lambda, I genuinely struggle to think of anything that’s truly “hostage” of a big provider or just plain worse. Especially amongst the examples you’ve given.