Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
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Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#2I read of Nix now and then. Seems its more than a fad. Why should I invest time? What makes it stand out?
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#3I am glad someone is doing this. There's lots of things in nix I want to try and use but the tooling and docs are just a bridge too far for me, if someone's going to give the initial ux a do over then I'm down for that!
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#4Nix and NixOS have had a similar sort of effect on me as Gentoo and FreeBSD have in the past. They have helped to expand my consciousness in the realm of systems administration and have helped me achieve new heights with my low latency audio configuration. For this reason, Nix and NixOS have become indispensable to my workflow.
NixOS introduces a new form of declarative configuration, fusing Gentoo's highly configurable nature with BSD's unified configuration file approach. For me, it's absolutely perfect until my own laziness bites me in the butt. If you want to do a gentle dive into Nix, resist the temptation to go full "NixOS" and learn the Nix build/environment system first. It will make things a lot easier for you in the long run.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#5I read of Nix now and then. Seems its more than a fad. Why should I invest time? What makes it stand out?
It's basically checking in your OS to git. It never gets crufty and almost never breaks. There's a lot more to it but those are the core ideas and I'm typing on my phone.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#6I am glad someone is doing this. There's lots of things in nix I want to try and use but the tooling and docs are just a bridge too far for me, if someone's going to give the initial ux a do over then I'm down for that!
Thanks, Jorge! I think the nix3 interface and the Flakes solve a lot of UX problems. Maybe we could do a bit of a user study, to see where you get hung up?
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#7> Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated.
I think I need a “Channels to Flakes”. I have an existing system configuration that seems to work fine without flakes. What am I missing out on?
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#8I read of Nix now and then. Seems its more than a fad. Why should I invest time? What makes it stand out?
If you are building a complex system with a large number of cascading dependencies then nix can literally save your sanity, however you have to get over the initial steep learning curve.
If your work tends to be more isolated and self contained on stable unchanging mainline or mainstream versions of any dependencies you have. Then it’s not worth your time and you won’t appreciate or understand it’s value.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#9The same Zero to NixOS would be highly appreciate.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#10I read of Nix now and then. Seems its more than a fad. Why should I invest time? What makes it stand out?
Closing in on 20 years of existence doesn't really qualify for fad
I'm just starting a serious learning journey with Nix after flirting with the idea for a few years. Mostly because I find myself endlessly working on tooling to support the projects I work on that Nix already does extremely well.
The feature I am most sold on is the ability to invoke clean complex development environments, that bring themselves to existence automatically as I traverse directories. If you work in code or in DevOps, Nix is totally worth a look.