Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
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Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#2Working with sandboxed/containerized/nixos stuff is like eating with chopsticks, except you are holding the chopsticks with another set of chopsticks. For a brief moment it is interesting, then it becomes a nuisance, and soon it is even painful to watch others do it.
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#3I only got started with NixOS a couple of weeks ago and I must agree. I would never consider running Nix on my daily Desktop machine (I'm using Arch BTW). It's more work and hassle than it's worth it.
OTOH I just set it up as the base for my new DIY NAS. There it is limited to just the bare minimum of bringing the system up and providing some core services (including Samba). And for this I found Nix' declarative approach quite good. I can easily restore the root system from the backed up config alone.
Everything else will be handled by Docker compose stacks outside the Nix eco system (stored on the RAID).
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#4Better fix your about page ;)
I've dabbled in NixOS and come to many of the same conclusions. The learning and troubleshooting overhead just isn't there yet (for me). I appreciate the concept and I do think declarative configurations do have a place in the near future, especially in corporate environments. I'll probably give it another go in a year or so to see if it's gained any more polish.
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#5I had a similar experience with NixOS and eventually gave up. I liked the idea of NixOS but I do lots of weird things off the beaten path and was constantly troubleshooting why things wouldn't work.
For me, building/running environments in containers is the least amount of friction.
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#6Working with sandboxed/containerized/nixos stuff is like eating with chopsticks, except you are holding the chopsticks with another set of chopsticks. For a brief moment it is interesting, then it becomes a nuisance, and soon it is even painful to watch others do it.
What would make it more pleasant?
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#7[deleted]
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#8Working with sandboxed/containerized/nixos stuff is like eating with chopsticks, except you are holding the chopsticks with another set of chopsticks. For a brief moment it is interesting, then it becomes a nuisance, and soon it is even painful to watch others do it.
What would make it more pleasant?
I'd say adopting JSON/YAML.
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#9The leaky abstraction argument is itself leakly. Yes, it would be nice if we weren't putting lipstick on a Unix pig, but Nix never promised the underlying thing wasn't Unix. It sounds to me like he is moving the goalposts.
If he wanted to run a bunch of shitty precompiled binaries from NPM for work, I would simply create a normie Ubuntu container or whatever and use that. There is no reason one's personal configuration should have to kowtow to such work things — it's probably better to have that sort of work-life separation anyways.
Re: Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
#10I only got started with NixOS a couple of weeks ago and I must agree. I would never consider running Nix on my daily Desktop machine (I'm using Arch BTW). It's more work and hassle than it's worth it. OTOH I just set it up as the base for my new DIY NAS. There it is limited to just the bare minimum of bringing the system up and providing some core services (including Samba). And for this I found Nix' declarative appr…
Can you elaborate on what were the friction points? I migrated from Arch to Nix several years back because I found maintenance to be incredibly easy and it also allows me to test things without fear. Arch and other imperative distros are still superior for some workflows, but you can always run something imperative inside Nix like FHSEnv or DistroBox. Nix is also available in Arch extra, so it's also possible to do this the other way round, with Arch as a host.