Will Nix Overtake Docker?

That being said Nix even with its usability issues works better for reproducible development environments than anything else (including Docker) ATM. Therefore in my view either Nix or something very similar will be the solution for this and replace Docker (some people run builds using Docker containers) for this use case.

I highly doubt this, Dockerfiles are simpler for a hello world microservice, but they get worse and unmaintainable when you add them lots of them with docker-compose.

>ostree is the future, not nix >flatpak takes care of the desktop aspect

I really hate the approach this approach, it just moves the state from the root system to the user. The root directory is immutable, but you move the whole responsability to Flatpak, which is not even comparable to nix. Meanwhile, in case of Nix, the whole system is reproducible and settings are more and less immutable.

>it's too complex

My whole nix config (with specific configs for vscode, neovim, chromium, wireguard, rust, python, nodejs, c++, go) is less than 600 lines of code, and it's readable. Also I configure most of my open source projects via nix as well as it's pretty easy to share the environment with the other developers. Nix works everywhere, on every linux distro, macOS and even Windows via cygwin or wsl.

>under documented

That's a really good point, nix maintainers didn't care much about documentation, but usability. But it looks like that's changing, they moved docs to mdbook and a team is working specifically on improving the docs

I have no experience with Nix. But a couple of red flags jump out of this thread for me are that "it's complicated", Haskell is somehow involved, and it is vaguely suggested that this is somehow similar to Docker. Which is clearly not the case.

When it comes to putting stuff in a docker container, I guess you could use Nix. But why would you? It makes about as much sense as using Ansible or Puppet for that.

Nothing against Haskell, but it evokes an image that might be a bit harsh to some but probably rings true to many: the wrong people getting excited for the wrong kind of reasons. I'm talking over-engineering here. People getting overly excited and creating a mess of hard to understand code that becomes a burden for whomever has to train up to maintain that code. People wielding hammers looking for ever more nails to wack.

I've unceremoniously ditched multiple configuration languages over the years. Usually it feels good getting rid of all the over engineered crap when you realize you don't need most of it anymore. Of course the flip side is that what you replace it with might end up being similar. Been there and done that.

However, I seem to only need a few lines of Dockerfile to replace what used to be a convoluted mess of puppet or ansible scripts to provision a thing that runs our thing. No longer needed. No more obsessing on how to, for example, get NTP tell the time to a server and why that somehow requires wrapping your head around a 600 line puppet module that does god knows what. Not a thing anymore.

Nix sounds more like that than like Docker. I used to know people that actually used puppet to setup their laptop. Nix might be a better product for that. But I'm looking to minimize the need for that entirely. Dockerized development environments are great for that. A laptop with a browser running vs code is all you need these days. People are using freaking ipads to do development even.

Most of the times this just gives me more questions than answers, like: what does the entrypoint.sh file in this repo do? Only to discover a plethora of shell script for setting up the runtime environment based on different environment variables. Most of the time not aligned with any common standard or with how you generally would setup the application itself.