The time to “give Nix a chance” was already years ago.
I think it's time to give Nix a chance
31–40 of 156 posts
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#32[flagged]
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#33I moved to nix around Nov last year and couldn't be happier, the motto 'nix fixes that' is true. First time I can say linux is trouble free. Upgrades are painless. Dev environments, reproducible. Largest repository of packages in the linux world. Next to zero time wasted configuring things. Foundation LLMs now know enough nix to get you out of trouble most of the time. It's perfect as a linux experience.
Welcome to the honeymoon phase. Mine lasted about a year. Eventually you will have to leave the comfortable area of "those who have done it before" and engage with some long, unwieldy, mostly undecipherable stack trace. When I asked a long-time Nix vet why he thinks people leave, he provided the most insightful answer I've seen yet: they just don't try hard enough.
Why is it inevitable that you have to leave the comfortable area of "those who have done it before" though?
Most of the benefit of nix for me is maintaining a configuration for a couple computers in a way that's easy to backup, upgrade, and recover with.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#34[flagged]
That's a shame, is there any funding transparency? Wasn't aware they were EU funded — thought they were independent!
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#35For me it is another Gentoo.
I had my time trying every new distro that would be popping up on Linux related magazines CD/DVDs up to the mid-2000's (they still do in some European countries), unless it comes on a laptop I can get at the mall computer store, or some customer imposes it on our delivery contract, not really something I want to give a chance to.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#36For me it is another Gentoo. I had my time trying every new distro that would be popping up on Linux related magazines CD/DVDs up to the mid-2000's (they still do in some European countries), unless it comes on a laptop I can get at the mall computer store, or some customer imposes it on our delivery contract, not really something I want to give a chance to.
> some customer imposes it on our delivery contract
It's happening: Companies are adopting Nix [0] and you may see such requirement come up some time.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#37Something I have always wondered about is how Nix interacts with my editor and language servers. I use emacs. The emacs LSP mode starts up a language server process for a language like Python or Go. If I use Nix to manage development dependencies like my compiler, linting tools, and even language-specific dependencies, then how do I get the LSP and emacs to use the correct Nix-y set of dependencies? To make things ex…
For each project, configure a nix devshell to include the appropriate linters etc for that project. Then configure direnv to activate the nix devshell when you cd into the project directory. Then launch your editor from that shell. Since the editor's parent process is the devshell, its PATH var points to that project's dependencies.
Or at least that's how I do it. That will make `ruff` or `pyright-langserver` point to whichever version of the tool is bound to that project. So when I run `nix flake update` it updates the tools for only that project and I don't get any crosstalk between projects.
As for whether a given linter or language server should be configured for that project, helix looks for .helix/languages.toml in the CWD to decide which ones to load, so that bit of config I handle independently from nix, I just add that file to the repo. Presumably emacs has something similar.
So to answer your question: you only get a project-specific version of emacs if you add emacs to the project's devshell. Otherwise whatever was already on your PATH will be used.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#38I moved to nix around Nov last year and couldn't be happier, the motto 'nix fixes that' is true. First time I can say linux is trouble free. Upgrades are painless. Dev environments, reproducible. Largest repository of packages in the linux world. Next to zero time wasted configuring things. Foundation LLMs now know enough nix to get you out of trouble most of the time. It's perfect as a linux experience.
Welcome to the honeymoon phase. Mine lasted about a year. Eventually you will have to leave the comfortable area of "those who have done it before" and engage with some long, unwieldy, mostly undecipherable stack trace. When I asked a long-time Nix vet why he thinks people leave, he provided the most insightful answer I've seen yet: they just don't try hard enough.
I think Nix is getting an unfair reputation for being too hard. Simple things are IMHO simpler in Nix than in any other distribution, and what one needs to know to accomplish them is tiny. It has basically reduced my sysadmin maintenance tasks to zero. In case of regressions, Nix makes it trivially easy to go back in time 2 or 3 years, cherrypick some packages and install them, or change your entire desktop environment, and then go back to the previous state with no effort.
Nix is hard if you need to build something difficult to package or something that has very unusual or dirty build processes. If you need to that regularly, Nix is not worth the effort unless you are an organization that values reproducibility and is prepared to pay for its cost upfront. If these particularly messy usecases are something that you don't encounter so frequently, you can always use an escape hatch to be able to make your install impure. For instance, distrobox is quite convenient to run e.g. an Arch or Ubuntu container. In my case, this has been helpful to run Julia, whose Nix packages are quite brittle.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#39[flagged]
Are you suggesting some connection between "most European" and "some areas of concern", and if so what? Or are you just making two completely independent statements?
I'm guessing from past comments of yours that it's the former. But if there's an actual connection, it's very not-obvious to me what it is, and a quick look at the "problems" and "crisis" links you gave doesn't suggest to me any connection with Nix's European-ness.
Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance
#40I use Nix and Home manager to keep a consistent terminal development environment (Neovim and friends) across my personal computers and on the HPC cluster. I never used NixOS. It took me a while to craft a working and flexible config, but since then I rarely touch it and only update packages once in a while. It works great for my needs.