Nix/Silverblue users: How big is the advantage if you already have 100% automated your deployments via Ansible? - eviltoast

There is a similar question on the site which must not be named.

My question still has a little different spin:

It seems to me that one of the biggest selling points of Nix is basically infrastructure as code. (Of course being immutable etc. is nice by itself.)

I wonder now, how big the delta is for people like me: All my desktops/servers are based on Debian stable with heavy customization, but 100% automated via Ansible. It seems to me, that a lot of the vocal Nix user (fans) switched from a pet desktop and discover IaC via Nix, and that they are in the end raving about IaC (which Nix might or might not be a good vehicle for).

When I gave Silverblue a try, I totally loved it, but then to configure it for my needs, I basically would have needed to configure the host system, some containers and overlays to replicate my Debian setup, so for me it seemed like too much effort to arrive nearly at where I started. (And of course I can use distrobox/podman and have containerized environments on Debian w/o trouble.)

Am I missing something?

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    3·
    9 months ago

    Thanks. I use Ansible myself, but I was more interested in how I would run Ansible on my daily driver, from my daily driver.

    • wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Sorry, perhaps I do not understand what you are asking for?

      On a *NIX box you install ansible, start sshd and then run something like:

      ansible-playbook -i inventory -u username -e 'ansible_user=username' all.yml  -K --limit hostname.domain.net