Rant about French government

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

They have 100.000 ,Ubuntu installs.
And currently 100 NixOS Secure install where safety is needed.
Plans for NixOS are really ambitious. If things work out smooth they can roll out 1.000.000 NixOS installs.
But there is a very big problem, documentation is very very poor.

The change of switching from Microsoft to Linux can be related to the "US cloud act". This act meaned, all your goverment data can tomorrow be located on servers only in U.S. [Even if this data is critical, military, police, national security ...]


And Offcourse they could use FreeBSD. Just one little problem drivers for laptops. And then we have chicken egg problem. Hardware vendors don't invest ... Why because of little market share...
 
The choice of 1 particular distribution looks like a false motivation. What's the point of NixOS? I can imagine a non-transparent container framework that does things unverifiable, but tha'ts based on what I read. I never used it,
 
Imagine i'm a government I must make a choise... I mean i can not try out all available distros. So French took two , Ubuntu & NixOS.
I can imagine a non-transparent container framework that does things unverifiable ? Sorry relation with Operating systems. Containers are mostly UGLY...
 
Alain De Vos said:
Imagine i'm a government I must make a choise... I mean i can not try out all available distros. So French took two , Ubuntu & NixOS.
I can imagine a non-transparent container framework that does things unverifiable ? Sorry relation with Operating systems. Containers are mostly UGLY...
Click to expand...
They didn't grab nixOS to have things happening by force and out of sight, like age vefirification and association with American cloud services? I would like to be convinced of that. So, what made them choose this system? It must be something running on top of the kernel and desired by the government.
 
If things work out smooth they can roll out 1.000.000 NixOS installs.
But there is a very big problem, documentation is very very poor.
Click to expand...

I used nix for a 6 months or so and you are spot on
the documentation is not just poor but pretty much non existent

the wiki pages only have a couple of paragraphs

the other major issue is you cant take your linux knowledge
on how to set up anything and apply it to nixos

and the reverse is also true you cant take your knowledge of nixos
and then apply it to "regular" linux to set things up

so you dont actually learn anything on nixos that can be applied to other systems
just how to write stuff in the nix language

then you spend you time rewriting you nix configs using the latest flavour of the month
like the dendritic pattern
 
MG said:
What's the point of NixOS?
Click to expand...
Only based on what I have observed at $work: the "lure" of NixOS is that you can have reproducible, known-state installs, in a way that you would never invest enough time in if you were trying to do the same with Ansible.
Known-state install is very useful in automation.
 
tingo said:
Only based on what I have observed at $work: the "lure" of NixOS is that you can have reproducible, known-state installs, in a way that you would never invest enough time in if you were trying to do the same with Ansible.
Known-state install is very useful in automation.
Click to expand...
In case of it running on a PC, I think you should wonder what's the cruicial "payload" knowledge that binds this particular software solution to 1 particular operating system configuration. Even while its content is beyond what's already part of the linux kernel. Technically, it can't be special or better because all the knowledge to create it is public and can be applied in any different environment as well. It can't distinguish honestly.
I'm not French but I would suspect this to be some disguised government trick and they are planting something in it beyond local root permissions.
 
It is a good choice....on paper....the only medium a bureaucrat actually cares for.

Infrastructure as code > Windows Active Directory+Group Policy (the real reason Windows is popular - admin just clicks few buttons and computers in group get software installed).

But nobody sane uses GPO on servers. Declarative whatever forces admins to standardize. Which is nice.

In reality you will find bugs in declarations or missing features. Especially if it is badly documented as you say.

Linux survives in servers because of Docker and kubernetes. But these are security nightmares and will go away.

Maybe the French gov thinks that with Mistral Ai they can pull it off, without army of linux techs.

Doesn't matter. The really important systems run RTOS microkernels. Pencil pushers can use tamagochi if need be or NixOS.
 
DanielBowman said:
Maybe the French gov thinks that with Mistral Ai they can pull it off, without army of linux techs.
Click to expand...
Mistral is an excellent way of losing one's time, it excels in terms or irrelevance, sycophancy, and hallucination.
If they want anything more or less useful, they should use, Claude, Grok, or ChatGPT, not Mistral.
 
tingo said:
Only based on what I have observed at $work: the "lure" of NixOS is that you can have reproducible, known-state installs, in a way that you would never invest enough time in if you were trying to do the same with Ansible.
Known-state install is very useful in automation.
Click to expand...
Yes and this reduce admin costs. These are the two main reasons why the government chose NixOS.

DanielBowman said:
Doesn't matter. The really important systems run RTOS microkernels. Pencil pushers can use tamagochi if need be or NixOS.
Click to expand...

Here, the choice of NixOS is only for desktop computers. Real-time systems are of little or no interest in this case.
 
MG said:
They didn't grab nixOS to have things happening by force and out of sight, like age vefirification and association with American cloud services?
Click to expand...
They did, I belive. Especially the cloud act is a huge c.f. waiting to happen. Looking at the treatment of judges and prosecutors at the ICC, you simply can not tolerate having mission critical things relying on anything that can be tampered with from the outside. Nein, No, Nyet, Nada.
Age verification has nothing to do with that, it is simply a cherry on top of that. You might get an ID ping whenever a person logs in, very nice benefit for creating profiles covering personel of a foreign gouvernment. No spy agency would want to miss that. No sane gouvernment would want to give that away for free. But the AI dependency and above all the cloud storage is (should be) a big NoGo for anyone.
 
tingo said:
Only based on what I have observed at $work: the "lure" of NixOS is that you can have reproducible, known-state installs, in a way that you would never invest enough time in if you were trying to do the same with Ansible.
Known-state install is very useful in automation.
Click to expand...
Only as folklore annotation: at this point, if I were the French government, I would choose Guix because many Guix developers are French, and it is more elegant than NixOS. With relative minor investments you can improve Guix a lot, because its core is rather robust and elegant. It is also systemd free (unlike NixOS), and they are trying to switch to an object-capability system for declaring services.
 
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blackbird9 said:
This has been tried before... lets hope it works out this time, for France.
en.wikipedia.org

LiMux - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
As to why they chose NixOS... gee, I dunno. Distrowatch puts it at number 22 in their popularity scale https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=nixos . I hadn't even heard of it before reading this thread. What happened to Mandriva anyway, that's from France, is that dead now?
Click to expand...
Mandriva used to be proper French company. Now it is a french foundation.
They had some drama recently - some former admin nuked their repo or something.
They got some flak when they praised XLIBRE project. I like them but their website sucks.

NixOS is fine concept. Theoretically takes away the pain of managing million desktops through bash scripts.
Adds the pain of creating actually working declarations or whatever they call it.
 
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