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- Hacker News
- "Can haz smol"
Why are we talking in fake childish speak?
by ChrisRR - Fewer tokens. Costs more to use full sentences. smol word less token cntby fragmede
- Considering "I Can Has Cheezburger" and that kind of lolspeak is nearly 20 years old now, I'm not surprised to see some people unfamiliar with it nowadays :-)by apt-get
- It's always fun to see an interrobang in the wild.by overtone1000
- I wonder if it makes sense to create distroless containers like this.by whazor
- i'm doing this using nix2container and a rust program that generates a landlock filter so i can mount nix store and only the supplied derivates are visible :) coming to you in a few month, tix.im
tbh, this is the most powerful computer program I have ever seen. Working on this now for over 6 month, ~600k LOC. I think it will grow to 800k in the base package. Unfortunately, uncompromised security requires quite some LOC.
This works: tix workflow submit ../vx-maintainer/workflows/change-management/default.nix --follow -- --feature-branch="feat/2lines" --instructions="tui overview should show running flows in 2 lines. 2 line: running steps, done, failed, etc. reports counter: info/success/failed/warning/error sparkle line with load ... . then if extended by double click, each running step has a line. what step, memory, cpu usage, token counters, ... subgraphs should be rendered under the parent flow. Title should always show that subgraph. details has link to parent " --source-repo=/home/poelzi/Projects/tix/tixim --implementor=opencode\#gpt-5.5
I get a human gate after the plan is finished where I can give feedback (in this workflow). And then another gate when everything is done. 4 different models, multiple harnesses, multiple reviews, rest cases etc. :) It makes me so smile watching the workflow progress. And the shit becomes global in a few days...
by poelzi - I got a bootable NixOS iso down to 91 MB. Pointed Claude at the Nixpkgs repo and asked it to strip things aggressively and inspect the build closure iteratively.
But the resulting ISO:
- has no network
- can't switch configurations
- doesn't have a text editor
https://gist.github.com/siraben/a8fce9912891d85e1ec3cf74081b...
by siraben - I miss tomsrtbt and all the other single floppy distros, it was surprisingly complete for 1.44MB (including networking, with more protocols than the average browser, and text editors): https://web.archive.org/web/19990506100919/http://www.toms.n... (mulinux iirc boasted about having 100 commands or something like that)by Chu4eeno
- Hey, thanks, nice adventure! I will have a look. I'm trying to ditch Arch for NixOS and I'm starting from Distrobox probably. Super useful!by lordkrandel
- Why ditch Arch?by HardwareLust
- > we should be able to disable shipping Nix entirely, by setting nix.enable = false.
It was at this point I began to question the entire exercise. If you don't want nix to even be installed, do you really want NixOS at all?
It would probably be much simpler to just build an image from scratch with the packages you want, composed in the way you want them, rather than contort the NixOS "UX" to produce the image you want.
by xyzzy_plugh - > build an image from scratch with the packages you want, composed in the way you want them
That’s exactly what this does, elegantly
by solarkraft - Pretty common method these days to build something just for the task at hand and consider deployment immutable requiring a new build of the ISO.by brianjlogan
- I disagree, I can reuse my entire tool-chain that I develop on, easily package things, get the whole reproducibility, integration tests, blah blah, and make an image for maybe an embedded or net-booted image that I would prefer be smaller. Especially if I have no intention of tinkering or rebuilding things on the final prod target. Much more reproducible and easily portable than say a giant folder of alpha-numeric bash scripts, installation scripts, etc.
- Yes? Because NixOS is configured by Nix code. But the user of the image itself doesn't need to run `nix`by whateveracct
- > build an image from scratch with the packages you want
Using what? Using NixOS to configure a system is orthogonal to the system actually running the Nix binary. Nix/Nixpkgs provide well maintained package derivations and module configuration for the largest amount of software of any ecosystem. IMO it's far simpler than Yocto or Buildroot or the dozen OCI container builder ecosystems that go in and out of favor.
- Nah this kind of thing is pretty common for servers or little embedded computers. If you're always building the image on some other machine, there's no compelling reason to include that binary or it's dependency closure on the system.
Typically someone who goes for this indeed likes and runs "full fat" NixOS on some systems. What they want is to get really small images for some special purpose, like containers or disk images for a puny old Raspberry Pi, and build them using their usual NixOS workstation or server or whatever.
by isityettime - https://sidhion.com/blog/nixos_server_issues/
Here's another good article on the topic
It's unfortunate that Perl and Python are core deps, as well as Bash
by nylonstrung - There is a project by a group of nix/nixos enthusiasts aiming to replace some of these core deps https://github.com/manic-systems/nixos-core. I havent tire-kicked it much, but it seems useful.by tfrancisl
- Less than they used to be: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/267982 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/428908by krautsauer
- Note that's somewhat out of date:
> `bin/switch-to-configuration` is a Perl script from the beginning
Since NixOS 24.11 the default is `switch-to-configuration-ng`, in Rust. That is a 2.8 MB binary, compared to NixOS's 55 MB Perl distribution. Thus such Perl-less systems shrunk that dependency by 20x regarding activation switching.
And since NixOS 25.11, `nixos-rebuild-ng` in Python replaces its former Perl counterpart, see https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nixos-rebuild
by nh2 - That's how I manage all of my virtual machines: building an ISO from a NixOS config and booting it as a virtual machine. I'm going to take some time to see what bits of this I can copy to slim down my ISOs.
One additional benefit: I build all my software from source (by disabling the nix cache) so stripping out these extra programs will not only slim down my ISOs but it will also reduce the build time.
by craftkiller - Curious bout your use case for building all software from source, is it because you're worried about the supply chain since nixpkgs builds don't have reproducibility guarantee?by khuedoan
- You could manage those VMs with https://microvm-nix.github.io/microvm.nix/ that helps with mounting the nix store read only from the host into the vm. That should save more space than trying to reduce the dependencies of the system closure of the vm.
- What's most amazing is how easy it is to switch kernels on NixOS as this article touched on. This prompted me to switch to Cachy kernels, and after some caching delay (apparently need to switch once before caches set) I was able to take advantage of a completely different OS's core strength. Truly the one OS to rule them all.by arikrahman
- The article does not mention switching kernels. It comments on the size of the kernel + modules; and trimming down unused modules.
Of all the things to get nixpilled over, this isn't one.
by cwel - Sorry, I am a bit confused about the caching delay, which seems to suggest you can switch kernels without rebooting? That's not what the wiki suggests[0], and what even happens to running programs?
Or do you mean just changing the "default" boot to a different kernel, which in other distros would require changing the boot loader config?
by bilkow