If I could push this to my kindle as an epub with an index. It would be great if these document frameworks would support it. At least a PDF.
Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
81–90 of 227 posts
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this. Our goal is to keep people on the "rails" of the quick start, with the Concepts as a way to fill out knowledge people are curious about. I wonder if we should downplay the concept docs in service of that? Or put more CTA's to go take the quickstart?
If thats the intent, then it seems the Quick Start is what I'd adjust to be more linear then : ) Again, it looks like a basket of equally-weighted links that a user is free to click into at leisure. It seems more like a directory of useful links rather than a "highly opinionated" guide to get me from zero to proficient. Compared to something like the sveltekit docs [1] (randomly pulled because I was viewing it today)…
Actually I just realized I was confused because of the homepage styling. On the homepage it has the "quick start" pill in an active state, which I thought meant I was already _on_ the quick start page. It turns out you click that to actually view page 1 of the quick start. But on that page the "linear list of topics" is only shown when clicking the quick start in the header nav. I would add that to the sidebar by default.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#83I wish guides like these contained screenshots. Do people use Nix for desktop OSes? As a VM they SSH into? A collection of config scripts that they don't directly issue commands to? I certainly can't tell from a quick glance of this guide
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Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this. Our goal is to keep people on the "rails" of the quick start, with the Concepts as a way to fill out knowledge people are curious about. I wonder if we should downplay the concept docs in service of that? Or put more CTA's to go take the quickstart?
If thats the intent, then it seems the Quick Start is what I'd adjust to be more linear then : ) Again, it looks like a basket of equally-weighted links that a user is free to click into at leisure. It seems more like a directory of useful links rather than a "highly opinionated" guide to get me from zero to proficient. Compared to something like the sveltekit docs [1] (randomly pulled because I was viewing it today)…
Yeah “Quick Start” is really a misleading title for this “section” as it is really the meat of the site itself.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#85I read of Nix now and then. Seems its more than a fad. Why should I invest time? What makes it stand out?
> Why should I invest time? It's not for everyone. Specifically, because Nix's 'costs' are upfront (for likely future benefit), nix isn't well suited to just-get-it-done pragmatic attitudes. -- e.g. if you'd prefer to just launch VMs from the web console, over using a tool like Terraform, then Nix isn't going to be for you. Nix isn't too difficult to use . I'd say it's 95% wonderful, 5% huge pain to deal with. (Writi…
How does Nix compare to Environment Modules: https://modules.sourceforge.net/ Am I correct in understanding they are similar, except Nix has the "pure" package building?
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#86I have tried several times to dig into nix and make it stick. Each time I get a little further along, but I always get to the same stuck point: things that I am trying to combine are unclear to me how they should fit together, and/or there are just massive amounts of code for what should be a simple thing. Nix flakes has indeed made it all quite a bit easier. But, sadly, in the interim, there are lots of things in an…
As someone who uses nix daily for work and home, I've found that there is always a nice concise way to accomplish what I want, but finding that solution is extremely difficult. It seems like the best (and sometimes only) documentation is the code itself, so until you get comfortable with the language you are missing a majority of the documentation. It's a catch-22, you have to know nix to learn nix. It really shouldn't have to be that way.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#87Just my two cents: Nix doesn’t guarantee “reproducible”, just “repeatable”. (I think it’s helpful to keep these technical concepts distinct, and to introduce the right terminology when teaching, since it makes elaboration easier in the future.)
With flakes it is reproducible in a self-contained way.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#88What does opinionated mean is this case? I read through a bit and didn't see any strong opinions.
# What's opinionated about Zero to Nix
Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated. Zero to Nix also deviates from official recommendations in that it recommends installing Nix using Nix Installer rather than the official Nix installation script.
https://zero-to-nix.com/about#whats-opinionated-about-zero-t...
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because it also makes your Nixpkgs config explicit (doesn't read ~/.config/nixpkgs/config.nix unless you source it in-repo) and doesn't rely on env vars (e.g., NIX_PATH) which are not given explicitly in the flake. But pinning Nixpkgs alone does get you much of the way there (and for many use cases— those where the only referent on it is 'nixpkgs' or 'nixos'— does make NIX_PATH redundant anyway).
> But pinning Nixpkgs alone does get you much of the way there (and for many use cases— those where the only referent on it is 'nixpkgs' or 'nixos'— does make NIX_PATH redundant anyway). What is missing compared to using flakes? The only `NIX_PATH` components I normally use is `nixpkgs` which hooks into the whole channel system (which is bad), but by settings my `pkgs` variable to a specific commit/tarball, I can ign…
Traditionally you might also use NIX_PATH for secondary sources of packages and modules, like the Emacs overlay, NUR, or the Nix-Darwin repo.
But yeah if you pin all of your package sources and set your Nixpkgs config locally, you get all the benefits aside from the Nix evaluator's 'pure' mode, which gets some evaluation speedups due to caching.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#90If you don't mind, a shameless plug: https://drakerossman.com/blog/nixos-for-apt-yum-users-a-gift... I am doing a similar series of NixOS-related stuff, currently got only a single article out, yet quite "meaty". You may want to check it out for a more streamlined approach in learning nix/NixOS which also compares it to familiar concepts from other Linux distributions. Will be releasing way more complete articles in…
My own shameless plug: nix by example https://mimoo.github.io/nixbyexample/