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Nix and NixOS, my pain points

remy.grunblatt.org

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Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#11

Post by kstenerud »

40yearoldman wrote: post #3
tsuujin wrote: post #2

I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don…

I keep reading, this, and keeping being told this. Yet I switched every system over to nix and have found no thing but the best examples documentation and help from nix to do so. Within the span of a afternoon and a bit a reading I went from zero, to a script that lets me setup an entire dev systems with just a few commands in a vm, and or even on hardware. If anything the Nix documentation is just as good as every o…

Then you are a superhuman. I too went through weeks of pain and suffering to get my nixos hypervisor running, and if I were to lose my script and have to start from scratch again, I'd just install Debian instead.

I would never recommend nixos to anyone. The concept is awesome, but the execution is terrible.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#12

Post by nrabulinski »

viraptor wrote: post #6

> When we use NixOS, and we want to use a package that is not available under NixOS / Nixpkgs (which happens quite often), we have only one choice: pack it into NixOS. That's not the only way. It's definitely the easiest option, but you can also create a temporary fhs environment https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/nixpkgs/commit/05742c15d5a...

What’s even easier is using steam-run which is technically intended to run games which expect FHS environment on NixOS, but it works excellent to run any binary which was built on another distro

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#13

Post by bollos »

tsuujin wrote: post #2

I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don…

This sadly also sums up my short-lived stay with NixOS. Tried on multiple occasions to get a working system to no avail and ultimately made me go back to Fedora where I remain until this day.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#14

Post by kkfx »

My very personal main pain point is documentation: Nix/NixOS do have some, but mostly or too little or deprecated.

Where is a proper Flake documentation? Where is a proper $newNixFeatureInVogueNow?

The second pain point is: Nix might sound nice to read and write as a language for Haskellers, but most people actually aren't haskellers...

The third is essentially the fists, more specified: target. If the target is desktop, or server, or HPC, or development docs should be shaped per target. Actually NixOS is designed mostly with dev desktops and infra target, but docs are not even for new devs, more something added aside just because it's part of the duty provide them in some form...

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#15

Post by pshirshov »

The real pain points are:

1) Abysmal contributor experience

2) Lack of typing in nix language and very limited debugging capabilities

3) Lack of interface concept in nix language

4) Lack of any markings on dependency graph edge

5) (3) and (4) makes impossible to have anything alike to gentoo's slots. Nix might be the only right way of doing slotting but it's effectively incapable of that.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#16

Post by laserlight »

40yearoldman wrote: post #3
tsuujin wrote: post #2

I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don…

I keep reading, this, and keeping being told this. Yet I switched every system over to nix and have found no thing but the best examples documentation and help from nix to do so. Within the span of a afternoon and a bit a reading I went from zero, to a script that lets me setup an entire dev systems with just a few commands in a vm, and or even on hardware. If anything the Nix documentation is just as good as every o…

By documentation, I believe people mean tutorials. At least, lack of tutorials is my complaint. I've read all introductory material. I want to build a customized version of emacs on nix, yet I have no idea how to do it or where to start.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#17

Post by guilhas »

> The documentation of Nix and NixOS is rather poor. To understand how a service or an option works, it is very often necessary to read the source code (`.nix’ files) ...

I think this is also a plus point, for Guix and Nix, how easy you can check the parent file dependencies, which are the same language as the configuration you're creating, and are easy to understand

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#18

Post by amelius »

My main problem is that Nix is based on one version of libc. If your system already has vendor-locked libraries based on a different version of libc, then it is quite difficult to get the rest of the system on that same version of libc.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#19

Post by viraptor »

pshirshov wrote: post #15

The real pain points are: 1) Abysmal contributor experience 2) Lack of typing in nix language and very limited debugging capabilities 3) Lack of interface concept in nix language 4) Lack of any markings on dependency graph edge 5) (3) and (4) makes impossible to have anything alike to gentoo's slots. Nix might be the only right way of doing slotting but it's effectively incapable of that.

What do you mean in pt 1? I've not experienced any issues there, but curious to hear from others.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#20

Post by viraptor »

kkfx wrote: post #14

My very personal main pain point is documentation: Nix/NixOS do have some, but mostly or too little or deprecated. Where is a proper Flake documentation? Where is a proper $newNixFeatureInVogueNow? The second pain point is: Nix might sound nice to read and write as a language for Haskellers, but most people actually aren't haskellers... The third is essentially the fists, more specified: target. If the target is desk…

> Where is a proper Flake documentation?

That one actually exists in the right place. (Assuming you meant the flake file)

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3...

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