The Curse of NixOS

In your first post in this thread, "high tier" NixOS users were called condescending sadists. This is a libel as far as I can tell based on my own experience.

Then was a list of disliked phrases, and second to last in that list was the instruction to read the manual. I believe in reading manuals, as difficult and time-consuming as the effort may be. This made me think expectations for using the project were wrong.

Now you're linking to a repo you made to attempt to give new users a guide to getting started.

You clearly made an effort to be part of the solution. This is admirable.

I'm trying to connect dots here - what I think happened was, in the course of trying to get help filling in the blanks, you probably exhausted the patience of others trying to help you.

I question if what you've been trying to do works at this point in the project's lifecycle. What you're trying to do is hard enough in a completely mature project. In an environment where we acknowledge the incompleteness of documentation, new command line APIs that are evolving, and new ways of doing things (I'm currently thinking of containers after looking at your guide, and flakes as well), communicating a true North is extremely difficult especially if you aren't one of the core developers immersed in the current state of change.

I don't think the project is mature enough to declare a "right way" to do all the things. I don't think we have enough mature users to support filling in all the blanks, yet, either.

I'm sorry you've had the experience you've had. Maybe after taking a break, you can resume your efforts, but with tempered expectations. We're all asking a lot of people who volunteer their time to build what should be acknowledged as a strategically important approach to computing.

We need more experts. The experts we do have are over-worked and under-appreciated. Perhaps you can help us there one day too.

Debian has far more packages but pure numbers are hard to compare when packages are broken up in different fashions and missing 1 package that 30% of users desire is more problematic than missing 1000 package that collectively 3% of users desire. More so if that 1 package is required for the users computer to work properly or indeed at all.

For a substantial number of users Guix has insufficient software availability and one notes that for example that for example Fedora which is very free software focused doesn't forbid you from discussing nonfree software in its channel. Elsewhere you tout that RMS wasn't allowed to remove clang from the package collection as if it were proof of value. Other distributions don't have benevolent dictators trying to remove useful free software for ideological reasons.

We are all habituated to what we perceive as normal. Neither situation is actually normal and indeed is sufficient reason by itself to ignore a superior product like GUIX and does a disservice to the cause of free software by decreasing the number of people willing to put up with it. I'd go so far as to say that without more liberal attitude from other player the entire free software movement would already be dead. A free software only default is perfectly fine as is acknowledging practical consideration to drive interest in free software in order to provide a larger base of people from which to draw potential contributors in order to continue to strengthen the base.

If GUIX is Debian than someone ought to just make a Ubuntu that largely ignores ideology and focuses on the practical.

ZFS filesystems within the same "pool" are also just more flexible.

The NixOS config part you can take from my repo. The command line part is the same as for any other linux. From memory:

cryptsetup luksformat physical-part

cryptsetup open physical-part arbitrary-name

some-command-to-make-file-system ... /dev/mapper/arbitrary-name

mount /dev/mapper/arbitrary-name

Nix certainly has a steep curve, but simple things are not that hard. I got committed to migrate to Nix one Monday. I spent the whole morning reading about it. In the afternoon, my workstation was already up and running. On the same evening, I packaged two exotic things I need which weren't on NixPkgs. Next day, I fixed my favorite window manager, which was broken on NixPkgs. I maintain all these on NixPkgs now.

Complicated things are not that easy, and I would not have been able to do all this if I had encountered non-trivial issues in the process. I also totally understand that the learning curve is steep. Nix has too much legacy stuff and cruft built in. There's the classic Nix command, Nix 2.0 and Nix flakes. They are all coexisting and not very well documented. Nix needs more manpower, funding and tooling.

With that said, declarative stuff is poised to be harder for non-trivial stuff. Just like Haskell is harder than C, NixOS is harder than ArchLinux or Alpine. I still very much find it worth the effort for simple workflows. I can now update remote machines without fearing breakdowns and state is very explicit.