11–20 of 51 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would make it more pleasant?
I'd say adopting JSON/YAML.
The 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 configurati…
I don't mind that because that's how my brain is wired, but there's plenty of people who don't give a shit and Just Want Things To Work Out Of The Box. Nix(OS) is certainly not for everyone.
The nice thing about container-based systems is that all the existing documentation for configuring a given program continues to apply as expected. Of course the tricky part is figuring out how to compose them together.
I 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…
For the first six months of using NixOS I couldn't run anything but a browser (I'm exaggerating a bit), yet all attempts to get back to Arch failed for me.
Now it's been over 4 years of having NixOS on all my computers, from Laptops to ARM SoCs driving my speakers. And so far I've no desire to try anything else. Moreover, when I was looking for new a NAS, I specifically picked a model allowing me to run an OS of my choice – so alien and unappealing seemed to me the concept of configuring things not through Nix.
To each their own. But the curse of Nix is a real thing. And if the OP doesn't try at least running Nix on Arch, I'd say, he just doesn't appreciate Nix benefits in the first place.
I 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…
I had the opposite experience. I started using it as a daily driver around 10 years ago and could never to back to anything else. It's just super solid and once you have it configured it just works forever. I agree that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially if you want to use something that's not in nixpkgs but those things are vanishing day by day.
I don't think it's just the steep learning curve though, I think it's just not for everyone. You _have_ to enjoy side quests where you dive deep into hairy problems, and effectively be willing to front load effort into setting up an environment so that it works well for you in the long term.
NixOS is amazing on a server and utterly terrible on the desktop. I learned the latter the hard way too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would make it more pleasant?
I'd say adopting JSON/YAML.
Nix isn't even that arcane. Its documentation simply sucks. Once you grasp the idea, it feels almost great
If I'm feeling really lazy, I just ask claude to generate the specific nix code for whatever I need that doesn't work or exist in nixpkgs.