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Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

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Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#81

Post by mindslight »

m45t3r wrote: post #59
tinco wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

> Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. I don't think it is fair to say that Nix as a programming language is horrible, IMO, as a DSL it is pretty good and fits the domain well. It is a strange language at first and it…

The semantics are great and necessary for Nix, but the syntax sucks. But syntax is the Afghanistan of programming languages, and all that.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#82

Post by easygenes »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #74
capableweb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes and I have never seen a convincing argument about why it would be better. This seems to indicate a huge mismatch between what you think Nix/OS is compared to what it actually is. NixOS is for creating/maintaining systems, Docker is for running applications and Kubernetes is for running applications but across multiple servers, neither of those tools are…

> Docker is for running applications Yes but no. Docker is mainly used for its ability to build and reuse standardised containers. It’s very much a distribution mechanism (I mean that’s why it’s called docker). From other comments I get the feeling that NixOS could be used to build reproducible containers in a way that remind me of building tools like Bazel but it’s not entirely clear to me why you would chose to do…

Docker and Kubernetes are almost strictly a subset of the power within the Nix ecosystem.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#83

Post by abathur »

exdsq wrote: post #68

Having worked in a large Nix dev environment, the difficulty in understanding what was going on meant devops were needed for the simplest changes. Ended up being a blocker for every project I was on. Love the idea but really really dislike it in practice. NixOS is cool though.

With the naivety of someone who's never worked in _any_ large dev environment: I would guess for that to work (at this point, at least) every team would need either someone who knows Nix on the team, or at least on-demand access to someone floating?

I feel like ~proficiency with Nix has is a bit of a superpower as a developer. It's an incredible lever. But I have no delusions about how hard some "easy" things are, especially around language ecosystems with their own package managers. And learning it is a good bit of work.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#84

Post by m45t3r »

easygenes wrote: post #65
m45t3r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. I don't think it is fair to say that Nix as a programming language is horrible, IMO, as a DSL it is pretty good and fits the domain well. It is a strange language at first and it…

rnix-lsp is decent these days: https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-lsp

This is exactly what I meant with "there is one but it is slow and limited last time I tried", but it does seem that they made good progress (the last time I tried it was some months ago).

Time to try it again.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#85

Post by easygenes »

KronisLV wrote: post #76
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

> A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. I don't have any doubts about the likes of Nix or even other attempts at improving the reproducibility of building and installing packages being technically superior to what we have now in some ways. But at the same time, you can't forget about people and in some ways the industry taking the path of least resistance whenever possible. You want to introduce…

Yeah, good points. Nix has been as-yet very pointedly a developer-centric ecosystem. And not just that, but developer-centric for people who favor functional programming in general.

There's some work especially in the last few years to make it all more approachable, but that's the background. Wait a couple more years and you will see more projects like Nix GUI here start to mature and then it will get very interesting beyond people who have backgrounds in, e.g. distributed computing and Haskell.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#86

Post by vlunkr »

tinco wrote: post #47
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

The fact that instead of upgrading, you had to wipe and restart doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for NixOS.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#87

Post by kvark »

tinco wrote: post #47
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

Crazy thing about NixOS is that it's so good, all the bad parts can be excused. I like to go on forums and complain about how the Nix configuration language is horrible, and there's not much documentation on how to get general things done. But that said, I'm still running NixOS on my servers. And no way that I'd ever go back to old fashioned provisioning scripts like Ansible. Just yesterday I had a problem upgrading…

Wait, isn't a point of NixOS is that your updates are guaranteed to be smooth? I haven't used it, but your story now worries me. I don't want to be back at "just reinstall the OS" days, even if configuration is portable.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#88

Post by totony »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. NixOS is so very usable. There are a lot of foot-guns but that's true of Linux systems. It takes some time to get comfortable with all the different ways to configure stuff. There's a new language, a new build system, a new Linux distribution. I've spent very little time relative to say, figuring out dpkg or systemd, or learning Bash or C or Perl, or learnin…

I have went pretty deep in nix recently and imo the "Fixing other people's garbage is the bane of any package system maintainer, it's no different here" + high learning curve + lack of xattrs and permissions support in nix store makes it a bad OS. The amount of custom code to fix "issues" and "issues" that are only fixed because the maintainer thinks he knows better than the dev is too big to be maintainable. Still a good package manager for eg macOS if you dont need that.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#89

Post by throwaway894345 »

3np wrote: post #16
solarkraft wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a concise description. All Nix people I met say „bro it’s so simple“ while the docs throw around 20 different concepts, multiple of which seem to be the same thing, but not really, but really you may want X in case you want to do Y but sometimes not except usually you do but well actually it’ll be replaced in a few months (...)

Hey, just go through this 20-page tutorial series and by the end you may be able to transfer that experience to that one ruby package with a particular native dependency you just want to build right now. https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/

Another aspect is that the Nix experience varies widely between languages, in part because of different levels of support for different languages but also because different languages’ build and runtime systems vary with respect to how easily they map to Nix. So your friend who heartily recommends Nix might have had a decent experience with his Haskell projects, but you and I working in the trenches with Python or Ruby are having a miserable time and everyone who told us Nix was great just kind of shrugs and chuckles as they tell us they don’t know how to solve our problems with Nix.

Re: Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through settings / GUI

#90

Post by Azsy »

capableweb wrote: post #67
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no opinion about NixOS but every time I read someone touting its merits I feel like I live in a parallel universe. NixOS seems to solve problems I never had at extreme costs to its general usability. I don’t care that I can rebuilt a computer identical to mine in minutes. I don’t change computer often enough for it to matter and the tweaking I do is minimal because frankly tweaking configuration is not fun and…

> it seems to me like it’s competing with docker and kubernetes and I have never seen a convincing argument about why it would be better. This seems to indicate a huge mismatch between what you think Nix/OS is compared to what it actually is. NixOS is for creating/maintaining systems, Docker is for running applications and Kubernetes is for running applications but across multiple servers, neither of those tools are…

The market you compete in is the market your users imagine you offer similar solutions. Not the market of how you describe yourself.

Docker's features usually include "its easier to create and maintain a system".

That Nix does this different and better doesn't matter when a user is just looking to solve that one problem.

At that moment, for that user, Nix is just a fancy config manager with one click deploy features and competing with docker.

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