Eh… Not really. Qemu does a really good job with VM virtualizarion.

I believe I could easily build containers instead of VMs from the nix config, but I actually do like having a full VM: since it’s running a full OS instead of an app, all the usual nix tooling just works on it.

Also: In my day job, I actually have to deal quite a bit with containers (and kubernetes), and I just… don’t like it.

I’ll DM you… Not sire I want to link those two accounts publicly 😄

Zero.

About 35 NixOS VMs though, each running either a single service (e.g. Paperless) or a suite (Sonarr and so on plus NZBGet, VPN,…).

There’s additionally a couple of client VMs. All of those distribute over 3 Proxmox hosts accessing the same iSCSI target for VM storage.

SSL and WireGuard are terminated at a physical firewall box running OpnSense, so with very few exceptions, the VMs do not handle any complicated network setup.

A lot of those VMs have zero state, those that do have backup of just that state automated to the NAS (simply via rsync) and from there everything is backed up again through borg to an external storage box.

In the stateless case, deploying a new VM is a single command; in the stateful case, same command, wait for it to come up, SSH in (keys are part of the VM images), run restore-<whatever>.

On an average day, I spend 0 minutes managing the homelab.

Interesting, that sounds more related to personal phone calls?

I was more thinking of the “single-purpose” kind of call, where you can communicate very clearly about your intetions

You (sadly) need to group all quality profiles into a single one, and then handle quality through a custom format. Example from my setup:

NixOS for the win! Define your system and services, run a single command, get a reproducible, Proxmox-compatible VM out of it. Nixpkgs has basically every service you’d ever want to selfhost.

Lost me at LLMs. My Nix config is over 20k lines long at this point, neatly split into more than a hundred modules and managing 8 physical machines and 30+ VMs. I love it.

But every time I’ve tried to use an LLM for nix, it has failed spectacularly.

I’m really glad my first (part time) job as a fresh-out-of-highschool 17 year old required me to call about 5-6 companies/people per workday. A good number of whom where existing business relations, so not a whole lot of room to fuck up.

First week was really anxiety-inducing, because I HATED making phone calls.

After that, no issue. Today, I’d 1000% rather call a doctor’s office, restaurant, plumber,… Than write an email. Online forms are fine, but phone calls are just better. You can get the back and forth often needed for planning done in like 5 seconds.

Read it, do not reply

Eh, maybe… But doesn’t this read very Trump-coded to you? There’s a pretty distinct stylistic difference between “beginner English as a second language” and “idiot native speaker” IMO.

This is 100% intentionally dumbed down to Trump’s level. Would actually be surprised if Macron wrote this himself, rather than a team laboring over how they can dumb it down to a level Trump will comprehend, without stooping so low even he recognizes it as insulting or manipulative.

It also gives you a great deal of pleasure when you come up with Zangendeutsch-Translations which are technically correct Zangendeutsch, but so impossible to understand that you know readers will not be able to decipher it, meaning they’ll have to ask you, so you tell them, and their groan is audible from across the internet.

And people say us Germans have no humor, tss.

Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.

In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.

For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.

Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.

With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:

• all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
• my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
• creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…