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The Curse of NixOS

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Re: The Curse of NixOS

#11

Post by colinramsay »

> I'm going to keep using it, since I can't stand anything else after having a taste of NixOS

This is how I feel about NixOS. I like what it gives me but I don't really like much else about it. Unless something _just works_, you're looking at hours of debugging which will most likely lead to failure. Off the top of my head there are a couple of things I've hit a dead end on recently:

- Packaging a Flutter desktop app because its build process downloads fonts from a URL and so makes the whole thing impure

- Getting Blender's GPU support working, I think the same problem is causing Webcamoid to crash on launch

Previously I used Arch, which I loved, but it was all to easy to completely shaft my setup and not be able to roll back.

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#12

Post by TheYumasi »

rgoulter wrote: post #6

"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry.""" Maybe this is nitpicking, b…

> Maybe that is difficult for people who haven't had an experience with pure/functional programming?

I found my understanding of the Nix language became a lot better once I started learning some Haskell. Specifically once I understood what currying was about.

My real gripe with Nix is the lack of a complete, easy to find, documentation of its "standard library". Nix Pills & a few wiki pages are far from enough.

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#13

Post by count »

rgoulter wrote: post #6

"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry.""" Maybe this is nitpicking, b…

We already had JSON plus functions. We called it 'JavaScript' :)

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#14

Post by AshamedCaptain »

> But at the same time, I can patch the Python interpreter and then have some software running on my system actually use the patched version, since all of this stuff is configured through the same configuration system.

If I want to do that, then I have to rebuild the entire system so as to use my patched version. This is because the NixOS "dependencies" are basically expressed as hashes of binaries.

That is for me the single biggest deal-killer of NixOS, Guix, and while we're at it -- static linking.

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#15

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

rgoulter wrote: post #6

"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry.""" Maybe this is nitpicking, b…

> Maybe this is nitpicking, but: the Nix language is about as straightforward as "JSON plus functions".

It's too simple and straightforward. Writing Nix expressions is a bit like writing Javascript without frameworks or libraries.

Some sort of opinionated framework that compiles to Nix would be great for maintaining large Nix projects. (The Javascript world already went though this phase.)

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#17

Post by nine_k »

colinramsay wrote: post #11

> I'm going to keep using it, since I can't stand anything else after having a taste of NixOS This is how I feel about NixOS. I like what it gives me but I don't really like much else about it. Unless something _just works_, you're looking at hours of debugging which will most likely lead to failure. Off the top of my head there are a couple of things I've hit a dead end on recently: - Packaging a Flutter desktop app…

I'd say that packaging an app for NixOS should include rewriting all such impure steps, and making the fonts packaged along with the app is one such step.

If the fonts can't be packaged for licensing reasons, even as a separate package, then well, you indeed can guarantee that you'd be able to install the app next time. If it's not what you seriously need, then likely the value proposition of Nix is not for you.

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#18

Post by pcthrowaway »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #15
rgoulter wrote: post #6

"""The first is relatively simple: they developed their own programming language to do configuration, which is not very good and is extremely difficult to learn. The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you're completely high and dry.""" Maybe this is nitpicking, b…

> Maybe this is nitpicking, but: the Nix language is about as straightforward as "JSON plus functions". It's too simple and straightforward. Writing Nix expressions is a bit like writing Javascript without frameworks or libraries. Some sort of opinionated framework that compiles to Nix would be great for maintaining large Nix projects. (The Javascript world already went though this phase.)

> Some sort of opinionated framework that compiles to Nix would be great for maintaining large Nix projects. (The Javascript world already went though this phase.)

Out of curiosity, are you talking about Typescript? Not really a framework, but I can't really think of a framework that 'won' in this sense for JS, and also compiles to JS.

On the front-end there's Svelte, which is actually compiled with Javascript, and React, which is has the biggest market share of opinionated Javascript frameworks, but at best you could say JSX is compiled to HTML.

On the back-end, there's express, but that doesn't involve any compilation, and is far from opinionated...

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#19

Post by vasergen »

colinramsay wrote: post #11

> I'm going to keep using it, since I can't stand anything else after having a taste of NixOS This is how I feel about NixOS. I like what it gives me but I don't really like much else about it. Unless something _just works_, you're looking at hours of debugging which will most likely lead to failure. Off the top of my head there are a couple of things I've hit a dead end on recently: - Packaging a Flutter desktop app…

> Unless something _just works_, you're looking at hours of debugging which will most likely lead to failure.

Exactly my experience, in this case I simply switch to my OS package system (I use Nix only as a package manager on my Ubuntu). I think, I have round 95% of software coming from Nix, for the other 5% that doesn't work out of box, I just do 'apt-get install'

Also, for installing different programing languages I switched from Nix packages to 'asdf', because packages on Nix often not up to date if I want to try recent release.

Re: The Curse of NixOS

#20

Post by mplanchard »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #8

As a NixOS user, I like this article a lot. But one thing stood out to me: > It also means that it's impossible to statically know what other packages a given package might depend on. Currently, the way this is implemented is essentially grepping a package for /nix/store/ to try to figure out what the dependencies are, which is obviously... not great. I'm not sure what the author is talking about here. He says it's i…

There is also a nix store query to find this information. I’m on my phone so I can’t get it right now, but I’ll try to remember to grab it later. You can query all the dependencies of any derivation… this is how I verify the full suite of software that nix-direnv installs for local projects, by querying the store for its cached derivation’s deps.
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