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Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

dgt.is

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Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#331

Post by z_mitchell »

_w1tm wrote: post #330
z_mitchell wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses Nix under the hood. I would argue that Nix does not make trivial environment setup easy. One of the reasons I love Flox for my own development is that I can just "flox install" packages. That doesn’t really exist for project-specific packages with Nix ("nix profile install" exists, but that installs globally). I would say give Flox a try and see if you actually run into issues. If you do, we're pretty good ab…

In my case I couldn’t get Rust working and ran into strange compilation issues with linker errors with the MacOS standard libraries. Tried installing them from Nix which fixed some problems but caused other ones. Everything just worked outside of the Nix environment so ended up dropping it.

https://flox.dev/docs/cookbook/languages/rust/

That describes how to get set up with Rust. Long story short, cargo depends on a linker and brings it along, but doesn’t expose it to other programs via PATH. If there are build scripts that call out to rustc or a linker directly then you need to explicitly install one. This is intentional, but yeah it can be surprising when you get an error about not finding a linker.

You also need libiconv on macOS for reasons, but all of this is described in the link above.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#332

Post by gregjor »

dgfitz wrote: post #128
pkkm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your veiled implication that Nix and NixOS aren't about "getting things done" is, I think, more than a little unfair. I'm using multiple programming languages at work. Each one of them has its own dependency manager that does basically the same job as the other ones. In Python it's Poetry, in Ruby it's Bundler, in JavaScript it's npm/yarn, in PHP it's Composer, etc. A lot of projects require extra setup steps outside…

> I think we've gotten used to development environments being a shitty experience to the point where it seems part and parcel of programming… I have staunchly refused to allow this at my current employ, and I’ve been there long enough where I can steer this. This isn’t acceptable and all it does is help introduce inconsistency and regressions. I realize I am fortunate in that I can effect change at my job in this are…

Agree completely. I used to allow every programmer to set up their own dev environment. Inevitably we’d have things that worked for one person but not another, and low confidence in deploying to production.

Eventually I forced everyone to work with a controlled dev environment on a remote server. They can work over ssh with command line tools or VSCode. Dev environments get rigorously maintained to mirror production. I got some grumbling about latency (everyone works remotely from around the world), but that turns out to present much less friction than the almost-daily debugging sessions and dealing with MacOS vs Windows vs Linux inconsistencies.

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#334

Post by pasc1878 »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #216
pasc1878 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Sturgeons law is at work here. "90% of everything is crap" I can believe that especially with nix - there isn't a defined way to do things. Most flakes out there will be done by newcomers learning and flakes is relative new e.g. 2020. The documentation of nix is bad. SO ChatGPT3 had very little good stuff to learn from and later won't have much better.

A lot of the documentation includes code snippets but with no detail or context on where those snippets should be, so ChatGPT often puts things in the wrong place.

As noted most of things are crap - here the thing is documentation

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#335

Post by rowanG077 »

3836293648 wrote: post #318
rowanG077 wrote: post #6

Nix for me has been a great source of stability. I used to run ubuntu and was never happy. Packages randomly broke, the UI lagged a lot, I always had to dig to get things working. One day when I head a uni deadline an automated updated destroyed my wifi funcionality. I had some experience with nix from work so in anger I installed NixOS. Wifi worked and I finished my uni assignment. Haven't installed anything else on…

NixOS literally just broke webcam drivers on alder lake and wake from sleep. That was a huge pain to deal with when updating for the rsync vulnerabilities. And a bunch of other issues. Thank goodness for perfect rollbacks. I'll take rsync vulnerabilities over a super broken system and try again in a few weeks.

When did that happen? I don't recall anything breaking once we nixos 24.11??

Re: Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

#336

Post by sigmonsays »

SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #169
sigmonsays wrote: post #37

i use nixos on VMs, my desktop (Gaming and productivity) and servers. I use flakes for everything. I've painfully learned how to do everything I need. My only big complaint is updating systemd. I have yet to figure out the systemd update bug. Sometimes nixos-rebuild-switch takes my network offline when updating systemd. It's incredibly annoying to update a box and have it drop offline. My work around is to do a 'diff…

Probably because it restarts the network service. You can configure the systemd unit to be only reloaded or nothing at all m

how do you do that?
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