351–354 of 354 posts
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No, that is not a fair summary; Nix is the nicest way to manage Python packages that I have found thus far.
I'm assuming you try to keep all dependencies on the nixpkgs version?
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I'm not exactly sure what you mean. NixOS doesn't have, like, a profile switcher to let you switch between work mode and play mode on the same PC. At least not out of the box. But if you mean distinct computers, then that's just three distinct configs. And it's easy to factor out common bits and use it in all three configs, since you configure things using Nix-the-language. And if you mean all three at the same time…
> NixOS doesn't have, like, a profile switcher to let you switch between work mode and play mode on the same PC. I thought that `sudo nixos-rebuild switch` was supposed to do exactly that; swap from whatever "state" your PC is on to the result of the nix expresison on "/etc/nixos/configuration.nix"
But it would be very unusual to constantly switch between two long-lived configs. I don't see why it wouldn't work, though.
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I tried NixOS and dropped it after spending several hours trying to make an experimental FPGA compiler work. The instructions were reasonable, but they expected to have a classic Linux distro: Fedora or Debian-like. I don't remember the exact set of errors (there was more than one), but NixOS+FHS failed so many times I gave up, and wrote that blog post. This is the essence: you can't expect application developers to…
Yeah, I get your point, but was responding to this: > Basically, NixOS = zero QA effort from application developer -> nothing works. "zero QA effort from application developer" does not imply that "nothing works" if the distro and community put in the effort instead.
Nevertheless community of NixOS developers is many magnitudes smaller than the amount of developers churning out new software, hence once you get off the golden path of the widely or somewhat widely software, the probability of a random thing working without additional elbow grease from the one who tries to use it is indistinguishable from 0, due to NixOS' dialect of Linux not being perfectly compatible with other dialects.
At the very least, documentation for the random thing will never tell you what to do under NixOS, and documentation is very much the part of the software product.
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It is answered at the end of my blog post: > I don’t care about anything that’s not packaged by the distribution > This is totally fine. Just note that you are using a niche OS with a limited set of applications available. Yes, Nixpkgs is large, but it does not package every piece of software out there, and you either at mercy of distribution maintainers to keep it packaged, or do it yourself. There is no way to disi…
The point is that with NixOS you are in a much better boat then all other distributions. Because the chances that an application is working on NixOS compared to $insert_distribution_here is much higher. I do agree that windows/OSX are superior here.
When I was using NixOS I regularely saw software that was tested on Ubuntu and Fedora and had installation instructions for these two distros, but was missing from Nixpkgs (because it was experimental, new or very obscure), and didn't work out of the box with NixOS' FHS.