21–27 of 27 posts
Nix and NixOS has an incredible number of features and use-cases that have almost no documentation around. The only way to discover those, it seems to me, is to look up people's nixos configurations on GitHub etc. Beginner level blogposts (that are plenty) talk about the same few features like ad-hoc development shell.
OTOH it finally got me over my fear of being a n00b and just use the source.
This makes me nostalgic for Trusted Solaris. Nearly identical motivations, but also allowed for runtime context switching (even within running X11 sessions) without a reboot. It combined Zones, ZFS filesystems, Crossbow network virtualization, a modified X11 server, and an auth framework to glue it all together. I don't know how widely Trusted Solaris was ever adopted, but I know that I haven't seen it in use in many…
> Maybe this particular NixOS strategy will gain more traction. Is anybody even vaguely relevant (ie. "non startup") using it in production? Right now it seems to be a plaything for developers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIL. Maybe I could get into the habit of using branches for experiments, and then including the branch name in --profile-name.
Please do. I get the impression that not many people use --profile-name, and I live in fear of them taking it away. It needs critical mass. Two of us should be enough!
Nix and NixOS has an incredible number of features and use-cases that have almost no documentation around. The only way to discover those, it seems to me, is to look up people's nixos configurations on GitHub etc. Beginner level blogposts (that are plenty) talk about the same few features like ad-hoc development shell.
You are right of course. NixOS ain't for the faint of heart. OTOH it finally got me over my fear of being a n00b and just use the source.
But I am extremely faint of heart, and I love NixOS.
The trick is that I'm not a developer, and I happen not to need to ask it to do anything complicated or non-standard. I expect lots of other people are in my position (although maybe not many of those people read HN).
Nix and NixOS has an incredible number of features and use-cases that have almost no documentation around. The only way to discover those, it seems to me, is to look up people's nixos configurations on GitHub etc. Beginner level blogposts (that are plenty) talk about the same few features like ad-hoc development shell.
I think it's not so much a problem of Nix/NixOS, but a consequence of the power of composability. For the next n years, people will keep discovering new things you can do. As the knowledge spreads, people will work out how to document the features and present them in ways that can be easily grasped. But the final success of NixOS will be when every distribution adopts more and more NixOS-like composability and NixOS is well understood and even boring, like the final success of Unix.