Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts

If it works for you, sounds good!

I comment because I recently had opposite thoughts - that maybe I should migrate off nix home manager - to keep 90% of benefits (nixos) and avoid all the headaches (home manager quirks). Funny how opposite experience we have.

For me I love nixos because how when I configure something it just works, and how when I break something I can just undo that easily. And I like how my system don't get more cruft with time and stays lean.

1) I Don't Know The State: there's some weird little bit of state hanging around somewhere I don't know about that's messing with my end result. Once I learn about this state, correcting it is trivial.

I hate this kind of problem solving, it's not mentally stimulating, I don't learn a lot, looking up answers online is often not helpful. And when I fix it, I don't gain a lot beyond just the problem not happening anymore. (examples: secret config file i didn't know about, an application edited its own config, file permissions were wrong, symlink was wrong, cache is invalid, etc.)

2) I Don't Understand The Concept: the idea of what something is supposed to do or why hasn't clicked for me yet. Getting to that state will take some time as I wrap my head around it. Once I do, I have that knowledge forever and can build on it to understand even more concepts.

I _love_ this kind of problem solving. It's mentally stimulating, it builds on itself, increases mastery, problems are easily found / troubleshot online because people are dealing with similar issues and not their own machine's personal state.

NixOS has been almost entirely the second kind of problem solving for me. The first two weeks were basically a full time job of fussing with my config but once I got it, I got it forever. Writing my first derivation was confusing, but now it's easy and it'll always be easy.

I think this is why Nix has been able to "get away with" having the abysmal, fragmented documentation that it has for so long - it's so good at being a near-stateless, all-encompassing declarative configuration that even outdated blog posts, random people's personal configs on github, even the nixpkgs source code can be helpful enough to solve your problem (and that's often all you have to go on!!!)

To me that's a large part of the very definition of a useful general purpose OS is that it's flexible and enables you to do whatever you need to do today, without the developers having previously somehow planned and provided for exactly that thing.

It's like the systemd argument all over. The exact thing systemd aims to prevent is the exact thing that made the original unix so powerful and useful that 40 years after architecting it, it still worked because they didn't try to think of every possibility, they gave you a toolbox that let you do whatever you might need to do. Where systemd sees a shell script as "unmanaged chaos" I see "unconstrained utiliy", a useful toolbox including a saw that doesn't have it's own opinions about me what boards I can cut.

If "Trying to hack on other people's junk with NixOS is just asking for pain." that is basically the definition of "this is not a useful operating system that empowers me to get things done". It's useful maybe as a crafted firmware for a static device.

(Not saying that nixos inflexibility is driven by the same paternal "we'll give you the whitelist of actions Poettering thinks are valid" attitude as systemd. In nixos it's merely a natural consequence of indirection and layering. They aren't trying to remove any agency from the user/admin, it's just the simple indirection itself that makes pre-planned and standardized things easier at the expense of anything direct and unplanned becoming harder.

Like instead of having an OS that may or may not be driven by ansible, let's replace the OS with just ansible, and now there is no way to do anything any other way except by figuring out how to write a playbook to do it.)