The Curse of NixOS
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The Curse of NixOS
1–10 of 361 posts
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#2I always found Guix more appealing, because it uses a programming language that is useful for other things as well (GNU Guile). I really can't stand having to learn a new language for each thing I want to manage.
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#3I always found Guix more appealing, because it uses a programming language that is useful for other things as well (GNU Guile). I really can't stand having to learn a new language for each thing I want to manage.
Does guix also have any equivalent to patchelf?
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#4> Almost all of the good things about NixOS are natural consequences of this single decision.
This quote stood out to me because you can really use it anywhere, just replace NixOS with any other piece of software, like:
"Almost all of the good things about are natural consequences of this single decision."
Looking at you, c++20[1]
- [1] https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/issues/18355#note_1...
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#5I always found Guix more appealing, because it uses a programming language that is useful for other things as well (GNU Guile). I really can't stand having to learn a new language for each thing I want to manage.
Does guix also have any equivalent to patchelf?
Guix uses patchelf.
Patchelf is very useful anytime you want to change the location of dynamic loaded libraries but don't want to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
It is used in more places than you might originally think.
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#6"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry."""
Maybe this is nitpicking, but: the Nix language is about as straightforward as "JSON plus functions". Maybe that is difficult for people who haven't had an experience with pure/functional programming?
Though, yes, the way Nix is used can be quite complicated/sophisticated. -- Even if all of Nixpkgs were translated to JavaScript, I think it'd still be complicated to understand. (Though I suspect using a more general purpose language would allow for more footguns).
+1 to the sentiment that most of the time you can get by just fine, but when you can't, NixOS is more difficult to make progress with compared to other Linux distributions.
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#7I always found Guix more appealing, because it uses a programming language that is useful for other things as well (GNU Guile). I really can't stand having to learn a new language for each thing I want to manage.
Is the author aware of Guix?
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#8As a NixOS user, I like this article a lot. But one thing stood out to me:
> It also means that it's impossible to statically know what other packages a given package might depend on. Currently, the way this is implemented is essentially grepping a package for /nix/store/ to try to figure out what the dependencies are, which is obviously... not great.
I'm not sure what the author is talking about here. He says it's impossible to find static dependencies, but then describes how it's implemented.
I'm also not sure why the author thinks this solution is bad? Maybe because it could accidentally pull in more runtime dependencies than you were expecting?
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#9I have been using NixOS for the last 6 months or so and it's been great for a daily driver. I use it across a half dozen machines I use for various purposes (desktop/laptop, some servers and VMs) and keep a similar setup on all my machines so they're similar and have all similar packages for reuse for my workflows.
The author is on point when you have to do any custom stuff (I basically have a bunch of hacks that do things a very non-NixOS way or use docker/containers for stand-alones) how rapidly things get out of hand. I still haven’t bothered trying to decipher some of that world yet.
Re: The Curse of NixOS
#10"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry.""" Maybe this is nitpicking, b…
For me, nix the language itself is not that bad. It's all the magic happening in nixpkgs and the tight coupling there with the user interface (configuration.nix, shell.nix, etc.).
In NixOS/nix, you are essentially extending the nixpkgs source code with your own configuration to build a system, which requires good familiarity with the source. This would be like having to write C code to install packages on another OS. It's a questionable design choice but it does offer a lot of power.