And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
Flakes and home-manager is unmatched. ❤️
So we did this because we didn’t like what the court said about not us but Israel and its war crimes? This is the hill the admin is going to die (and drag us with them) on?
Gotta love how all these cunt ass companies are objectively doing worse and losing business present and future for putting mango Mussolini in charge. They can all choke on their avarice.
Netherlands: “Let’s make The Netherlands great again.”
United States: “What have we done.”
US: Let’s sanction everyone everywhere all at once!
Also US: Why don’t people want to be dependent on US systems? 😭
Couldn’t undermine the country more if they tried, which makes one wonder.
Yep. Trump’s actions are no different than what any bad actor would do if they wanted to destroy the USA without invading it.
- Destroy our soft power… check!
- Turn allies against us… check!
- Destroy our economy… check!
- Drastically weaken our military… check!
Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well
And I’m accepting that he does it because he’s likely a Russian asset, but why the fuck are the rest of them playing along? You can’t tell me they’re all being bought.
They want corporate slaves, if the us is governed by the rich and corporations, corporate cities/islands they are trying to build are not needed anymore.
I wish. Organizations and countries/municipalities are far too lazy to make the change.
The time and money involved are both staggering. This isn’t about you switching operating systems on your personal laptop.
Where are you going to get support staff anytime soon? All those Windows admins magically switching to Linux overnight?
Hell, Linux offers nothing remotely comparable to the power of Active Directory. That alone will keep Windows in the lead.
And more. This isn’t about lazy.
What is the alternative to AD, and are there currently companies running that, big or small?
At this point, a lot of entities don’t need AD because their entire workflow runs in a web browser, and practically any SSO provider will work.
That said, accessing actual computer resources can be managed with groups and ACLs. Perhaps not as elegantly or as well-integrated as AD is, but that’s the price you pay.
Red hat IDM, aka freeipa.
Depending on what youre doing you absolutely don’t need active directory.
Hell, a lot of orgs are just going entra anyway. If you’re using SSO like that or okta or keycloak you likely don’t need AD.
Time + motivation + money can overcome a lot of obstacles. It also helps that template of what is needed already exists in Active Directory. This changes the project from “innovating something new” to “a slightly better copy” and is usually a lot faster and easier.
All copyright/patents are also void because of the sanctions at least in practice.
Yea we got a bit of the “inmates are running the asylum” situation over here.
In the immortal words of the joke (paraphrased) this country needs an enema
we would lose about a third of our human biomass
Oh well
Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
I am in a large (couple thousand staff) company and I cant get why we dont selfhost everything. Like yeah it would have an upfront cost but the savings stack immediately. We spend like 30-50 a user for office access.
Copilot is so shit and we could build an alternative with relative ease and never pay again. It wouldnt be baked into teams but who gives a fuck.
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
This great news! Away with USA!
Next up, convince everyone to drop Meta, including WhatsApp and IG!
And then Google and Amazon, somehow.
US: You want to cut us off? No! We cut you off!
NL: How petty are you?
US: Yes.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. 😒
Considering the Dutch have ASML,
That’s a card which only hurts ASML if played.
If ASML has many competitors, then yes.
If ASML had many customers, then yes.
Intel is ASML’s single largest customer, making up a full quarter of their income. TSMC is the next biggest, but all their current expansion is in USA, so they’d probably not be able to buy anything either.
Next then is Samsung who are also building out US fabs, but also new Korean fabs, so some of their business wouldn’t be allowed.
Global Foundries would also be out.
ASML would have to survive losing 60% or more of their current income. They’d be gone in a year since EU countries don’t/won’t subsidise semiconductors. (see: The loss of Qimonda, Global Foundries stuck on 28nm in EU forever, etc)
But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA
Do US-Americans fell insulted if you call them just another american country?
Not OP, but I don’t understand your question.
As a US citizen, I try to say “The States” instead of America when talking about my country. I do that out of respect for all of the countries that call these two beautiful American continents home.
I admit to defaulting to “American” instead of a cumbersome “United Statesian” or the above “US Citizen.” But that’s what we grew up calling ourselves and told to call ourselves and our fellow countrymen.
“Just another American Country” seems like it would be insulting to Canada, Chile and all of our neighbors in between. I’m not sure my fellow Americans would even pick up that you were talking about the States unless you really layed on thick context.
How much asml machine in the us rn ? That s not how stuff work
Tell us, how does “stuff work”? What up and running alternatives do the US have to ASML machines for latest generation high performance silicon? No matter where.
Look at asml client. Either us or Taiwan. They can’t skip that market. U dont have alternative to asml yet but asml has no alternative for client either. Also fab are long term devlopement thoses contract are already lock. And asml play by american rule regarding ban export and so more. Asml is never gonna ban the us. The us can but it serve them no purpose. Asml is a public traded company. If u think they gonna loose their biggest client… Idk what to say but that s unreal
ASML plays by US rules as long as things don’t escalate badly. Your arguments only work during nice weather. When things get tough, ASML is squarely located in the EU and will comply with local laws and law enforcement. That is a substantial risk for the US if it were to go for all out economic warfare, like forcing Microsoft to boycott EU customers.
Of course ASML has no interest in such a thing, nor does Microsoft. The Single Market is a very big market for Microsoft. Also, blowing it up would not just pulverise that market, it would lead to a collapse of most of the business outside of the US in the mid term.
So first part of your argument is saying it can happen and second part is saying why it won’t happen. Yeah I agree it won’t happen. And ms sell service wich isn’t the same as the fucking lithography that power everything advanced under the sun.
Ps : second time you intervenir on my comment to say I’m right by prefacing I’m wrong. Kinda funny. Waiting for the third time
You either deliberately misunderstand my arguments or really misunderstand them. The companies don’t want that of course, but it is not entirely in their control. The EU certainly doesn’t want it either. Regarding the US, it really depends. It depends on how much the strongman in DC fears that the other side can actually retaliate. A nuke’s value is not that it destroys everything, its value is that it could destroy everything. Russia would not have invaded an Ukraine with nukes, yet Ukraine would likely never used any nukes even if it had them.
Of course ASML is not the only economic nuke Europe has. If the US unleashes economic nukes on the EU by for example forcing Microsoft to block many or most services over night, the first response would be to threaten nuking the USD, with a believable threat scenario, but ASML would be a backup option.
Funny you took ukraine exemple, cause they had nuke. And u will never guess who sat with Russia to give them the guarantee they won’t keep their nuke. Anyway whatever you talk about it s far from reality. U could just find one export ban from the ue toward the usa that could help your point a lot dont you think ?
I’m in a local administration in France, it’s rapidly getting closer to home… Our higher-ups somehow decided a thourough Microsoft integration was a good idea like 5 years ago.
Seems like we’re just one political comment about support to the ICC to be in the same situation. And I mean, fuck it, we should be. But I am not happy about the shit we’ll have to go through to purge it all now.
If I can sell my house, I’ll do it. But I’m in the US. Sure do want out. My house has been on market for 5 months.
Finally. Been saying for years, NixOS is the obvious choice for a gov distro.
The only thing is this doesn’t yet do online user directories, local users only
Which is a big constraint right now
Why?
Honest question.
from a sys admins perspective it’s painfully easy to deploy across hundreds of machines. NixOS is declaritive and immutable. you can take one system configuration of NixOS and throw the same config on as many machines as you want. packages, dotfiles, whatever are all replicated the exact same way on each machine. You can lock all the packages/apps, configs, kernels, etc to a specific version therefore a sysadmin may only need to upgrade the lot once a year. if a user some how breaks their system it’s as easy a fix as rolling back to the previous generation with a single menu option.
So basically say you have your computer and you want to replicate your exact setup to hundreds of other computers. with NixOS it’s as simple as setting up a git repo for your nixos config, pushing to it, installing nixos on every other computer then cloning your repo to all the machines and rebuilding. done. now you have hundreds of other computers that all behave and work the same way your computer does.
If something needs updating or a fix needs to be rolled out all a sysadmin has to do is fix it on one machine, push the change, pull it for every other machine and rebuild. done.
Or just configure all the machines to auto-update from the flake at the repo. Doing this for my VMs. I have a CI machine that builds my pinned flake from the repo tip, and about 30 other VMs check nightly if the repo tip has moved, and if so, rebuild from the new tip; which, thanks to the CI machine, means just downloading and activating a new generation, nothing compute heavy.
My guess would be the deterministic configuration management. If it’s for a personal machine then do what you want to make it your own but if it’s an organization (e.g. government) you want the machines to be as similar as possible to reduce maintenance. Think cattle, not pets.
Ansible is a thing though. It is also a more complete, mature and easily substitutable solution vs pinning your hopes on a single distro.
Programmers like NixOS because they are programmers.
I mean they sort of serve different purposes. You can build a NixOS ISO running your exact desired configuration that is good to go immediately upon install. Ansible would require post install configuration, yes it is scripted but it is additional overhead and time. I think a better alternative would be an OCI based distro with a Packer build pipeline, which could include Ansible steps higher up in the build process. But that’s more complexity that Nix wouldn’t require
i used ansible some years ago and i’m using nixos currently and you can not compare those two.
i was not fluent in ansible and i’m not fluent in nixos. yes you have to leave your comfort zone for nixos, but your get so so much more.
the jinja templates in yaml feel like a big hack if you used nixos.
would really be interesting to hear someone talk who is comfortable to use both of them.
I’m honestly amazed ansible still exists. I used it regularly like 10 years ago and never liked it. I use NixOS for all my servers and package all my code as nix flakes, and I agree that they’re barely comparable.
NixOS is a kinda frustrating desktop distro to me though. Sometimes you just wanna type
make
Ansible is US-owned. Even though it’s open source, Redhat, a US company, is the one that controls its lifecycle.
NixOS is based out of the EU.
Fun fact, Nix, Nixpkg and NixOS have their roots in the Netherlands. For example, Nixpkg was even described in a PhD thesis at Utrecht University.
Aren’t Nix repos hosted on GitHub which is owned by MacroSlop?
It’s close, but Ansible is often not deterministic.
I am curious, what makes NixOS such a good choice?
But not curious enough to read the article.
You know, you could simply be helpful.
Sure.
It’s in the fourth paragraph, starting with
From a technical point of view…
and ending with
… would usually balk at.
From the article:
Its use of the Nix package manager means that each package is installed in its own directory with immutable and signed contents. That alone means that the setup is incredibly easy to reproduce across multiple machines, something that is an obvious benefit when dealing with different facets of a government.
Id argue an immutable distro would likely serve the same purpose but maybe its also because nixos isnt as “locked down” so itd be easier to configure for a specific purpose?
The big draw is probably that it’s declarative, so you can define installations as code much the same way as you would do with Terraform. Instead of needing a pile of messy Ansible playbooks running custom scripts to change anything (and which can break if the target machine has an unexpected config), you’d just have one that pushes a new version of the config and runs nixos-rebuild. Rollbacks are just as easy if anything breaks. What’s not to like?
Right so in that way, its very reproducible. That was my understanding and I appreciate you for the more in depth explanation but is there advantage to that versus an immutable distro? Wouldn’t a immutable distro work in a similar way being reproducible among many machines?
Rollbacks can be done on immutable distros as well right? I’m just curious why Nix was the first choice and not something immutable.
Thanks. I read Smiletolerantly’s comment as a personal opinion, rather that a summary of the article. I read several articles in Dutch news outlets, but the main message was ‘hurr-durr-Dutch’.
nix is on a whole different level than silverblue and other ‘atomic’ distributions.
Now we need to convince Canada to do the same. If everyone leaves Microslop, that would make a huge impact.
I’ve been doing a project https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-07-04-a-declaration-of-independence/ ever since Independence Day and I have been shocked by how insane the open-source tooling out there is now. NextCloud and Collabara alone solves 90% of company’s needs. ERPNEXT covers a huge swath in mid-range needs. I combine it with a mailcow server and Authentik for SSO and I am not sure how much else most businesses need. The whole stack is zero cost.
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it’s easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just
nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool>andexitwhen I’m done with it is magnificent.That’s the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I’ve been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don’t work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I’m really stoked about this.
Personally id say try it in a VM*. Home-manager and nix packages (and even flakes at this point) havent felt like experimental features for a good 5 years for me on NixOS
NixOS is great, but it definitely breaks things. It’s the way it works, though, not whether the software is bleeding edge. Nix lets a package specify its own dependencies, even if those dependencies conflict with those of another package. It does this by breaking the traditional POSIX file system structure that many programs assume they can depend on. It puts all sorts of things where they “don’t belong”, and then uses a small army of environment variables, scripts, and symlinks to stitch it back together so that no individual package realizes what happened. If you only use software from the package manager, this is often (but not always) seemless, but if you download stuff from the web, none of the system libraries it traditionally expects are there. Likewise, if you’re using Nix alongside something like Debian’s apt, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the two package managers doing things in two different ways causes some issues that are hard to interpret to the uninformed.
