Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)

In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).

AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.

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tombert an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It’s also the easiest if you want to make your own “distro”.

A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.

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opan an hour ago | parent [-]

I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.

	▲	qubex 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” — Simonyi

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skohan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!

The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.

But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.

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rgoulter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software

May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.

e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.

With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.

If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.

	▲	rounce 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It requires rebuilding the nodes whose inputs have been affected by the change, not the entire tree.

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fsiefken 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv

for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...

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kevincox an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).

IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.

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nba456_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would not be so confident the people making these decisions are smarter than you.

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mastermage 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.

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steinwinde 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't it counterproductive for every European country with a bit of extra money to develop its own open source software stack?

Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?

Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?

	▲	mastermage an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh sorry that is what I meant i would like this to be a EU wide ecosystem working together.
	▲	Forgeties79 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’m hardly an expert, quite the opposite, but I imagine coordinating all those groups across multiple countries that don’t have a unified bureaucratic system would undo any disadvantages of just working on them independently and open sourcing at all. In theory they could all start borrowing from each other eventually.