Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

20 years of Nix

20th.nixos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: 20 years of Nix

#21

Post by pveierland »

amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

Currently working on a graphical UX where you can create and share flakes without writing Nix code at https://mynixos.com

The site makes it easy to browse indexed flakes and configure flakes via options and packages. Hopefully the structure provided by the UI can makes it easier to get started with Nix flakes :)

Re: 20 years of Nix

#22

Post by rgoulter »

pbronez wrote: post #19
domenkozar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! We've been working at Cachix to address this using https://devenv.sh/ . It's primary targeted to improve DX and on-board users quickly.

DevEnv looks neat, maybe I’ll try it. I expect my main hurdle will be stuff that isn’t in NicPkgs. Especially for dev stuff, I’m going to want to pull in low-profile GitHub stuff or Python packages. What’s the escape hatch to bring those into the dev environment?

> What’s the escape hatch to bring those into the dev environment?

One thing you can do is try the Nix package manager on your Linux or macOS system. -- If it's not in nix, you can just do it the way you did things before.

If you want to try NixOS:

1. Writing a package is only necessary for sharing code.. you can still just have Python, setup a virtual env, & run the program as you would.

2. You could use a tool like Podman or Docker, to run stuff in containers. I've heard stuff like https://github.com/containers/toolbox helps this.

(Among other solutions).

Re: 20 years of Nix

#23

Post by ziml77 »

dindresto wrote: post #15
anarchogeek wrote: post #14

Doe nix work at all? Or is it just not actually functional on top of MacOS? I've tried a dozen times over the years and I've never gotten it working. Seriously, how is anything so hard to use still around after 20 years!

You might want to give the new installer by Determinate Systems a try: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer

I'm definitely going to give that a try. I had issues with the Bash script on macOS and was annoyed that it left me with a system that I had to manually clean up.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#24

Post by tomberek »

amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values.

For example; people seem to have accepted that the benefits of using terraform in spite of various difficulties - the learning of its language or needing to hire specialists. The mantra of "infrastructure as code" is enough to drive adoption. What is our mantra? We need to accept that "reproducibility" isn't quite working and that we need either a clearer message, or to explain the message.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#25

Post by rgoulter »

shp0ngle wrote: post #13

nix is one of the things I always think would be neat to try, but I’m always scared away by the complexity.

You can get quite far without having to be aware of significant complexity.

e.g. to take a look at https://devenv.sh/ or https://www.jetpack.io/devbox/docs/installing_devbox/ which aim to leverage nix without requiring nix knowledge.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#26

Post by tripdout »

domenkozar wrote: post #5
amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

Hey! We've been working at Cachix to address this using https://devenv.sh/ . It's primary targeted to improve DX and on-board users quickly.

This looks like a really nice UX improvement on top of typical Flake devshells.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#27

Post by lostmsu »

amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

What are the footguns? I feel that footgun descriptions always have the most insightful bits about technology.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#28

Post by carapace »

tomberek wrote: post #24
amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values. For example; peopl…

I disagree, I think the value proposition for reproducibility is clear, it's just that the learning curve "is too damn high!" I'm highly motivated to learn and use Nix (or Guix for that matter) but I've bounced off of it three or four times now, and I'm the kind of weirdo who learns new PLs for fun.

Someone once said that you don't learn Nix, you reverse engineer it.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#29

Post by rgoulter »

tomberek wrote: post #24
amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values. For example; peopl…

> We need to accept that "reproducibility" isn't quite working...

I guess it doesn't sell Nix as strongly as it could..

But, it's hardly for a lack of enthusiasm on Nix user's part. -- Rather, I've seen a few "what's nix good for anyway" comments, and this results in many lengthy replies extolling nix.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#30

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

I find there is a perfect middle ground here (applies to multiple languages like this.)

Nix + LLM.

Especially if using GPT4 for quality. You get all of the usefulness of Nix, but created or edited using plain English.

And then of course at the end you output the nix as an artifact to live in version control.

Post reply on HN