zlacker

>>birdcu+(OP)
There is something to be said about NixOS, it really is a matter of setting `services.immich.enable = true;` in a configuration file. I find this really powerful and simpler than docker and docker-compose. But don't get me wrong, I am all for containerization when it comes to other OS/distros. Yes, there is a learning curve for the Nix language and creating your own packages. But anyone who can install a distro can install NixOS. Instead of running your apt/dnf/pacman commands, you edit a file with your package names and services you want to enable, and run `nixos-rebuild switch`. Though, you might find standalone binaries such as uv and its portable Python bundles don't work out the box, there is a a few lines configuration to get it working. Having a single language for configuring all services/applications (neovim,nginx,syncthing,systemd, etc) is refreshing. And of course combined with generative AI, you can set up a lot quickly.

Immich is one of the only apps on iOS that properly does background sync. There is also PhotoSync which is notable for working properly with background sync. I'll take a wild guess that Ente may have got this working right too (at least I'd hope). This works around the limitation that iOS apps can't really run as background apps (appears to me that the app can wake up on some interval, run/sync for a little and try again on the next interval). This is much more usable then for example, the Synology apps for photo sync, which is, the last time I tried, for some reason insanely slow and the phone needs to have the app open and screen on for it fully sync.

Some issues I ran into is the Immich iOS app updating and then being incompatible with the older version of the server installed on my machine. You'd have to disable app updates for all apps, as iOS doesn't support disabling updates for individual apps.

In my specific scenario, the latest version of Immich for NixOS didn't perform a certain migration for my older version of Immich. I had to track down the specific commit that contained the version of Immich which had the migration, apply that, then I was able to get back to the latest version. Luckily, even though I probably applied a few versions before getting the right one, it didn't corrupt the Immich install.

>>trizic+QMj
I'm running NixOS on some of my hosts, but I still don't fully commit to configuring everything with nix, just the base system, and I prefer docker-compose for the actual services. I do it similarly with Debian hosts using cloud-init (nix is a lot better, though).

The reason is that I want to keep the services in a portable/distro-agnostic format and decoupled from the base system, so I'm not tied too much to a single distro and can manage them separately.

>>kalaks+tOj
How do you update the software in the containers when new versions come out or vulnerabilities are actively being exploited?

My understanding is that when using containers updating is an ordeal and you avoid the need my never exposing the services to the internet.

>>quag+ZOj
Your understanding of containers is incorrect!

Containers decouple programs from their state. The state/data live outside the container so the container itself is disposable and can be discarded and rebuild cheaply. Of course there need to be some provisions for when the state (ie schema) needs to be updated by the containerized software. But that is the same as for non-containerized services.

I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025, what field do you work in?

>>teeker+R2k
It's not that easy.

First I need to monitor all the dependencies inside my containers, which is half a Linux distribution in many cases.

Then I have to rebuild and mess with all potential issues if software builds ...

Yes, in the happy path it is just a "docker build" which updates stuff from a Linux distro repo and then builds only what is needed, but as soon as the happy path fails this can become really tedious really quickly as all people write their Dockerfiles differently, handle build step differently, use different base Linux distributions, ...

I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025, what field do you work in?

>>johann+Auk
It does feel like one of the side effects of containers is that now, instead of having to worry about dependencies on one host, you have to worry about dependencies for the host (because you can't just ignore security issues on the host) as well as in every container on said host.

So you go from having to worry about one image + N services to up-to-N images + N services.