NixOS and my descent into insanity
ersei.net
NixOS and my descent into insanity
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Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#2> At this point I had a home.nix that spanned a couple of thousand lines. This is a bad idea, mostly because it's hard to manage.
This has also been my experience with home-manager. The promise is great - it's like DLC for Nix that just Does More™. Then you get into it, and realize the modules are a lot more fragile and most of them are outdated. Then you're a few hundred lines in with workarounds, DBUS declarations and all sorts of declarative ricing and go "is it worth it?".
Since then I just removed all the home-manager stuff and relied on NixOS' native config. Things are much more stable and easier to define, and I haven't found a whole lot of things that are truly undoable without it. It's slower and non-declarative, sure, but my sanity is all the better for it. I hope I'm not the only one out there.
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#3> At this point I had a home.nix that spanned a couple of thousand lines. This is a bad idea, mostly because it's hard to manage. This has also been my experience with home-manager. The promise is great - it's like DLC for Nix that just Does More™. Then you get into it, and realize the modules are a lot more fragile and most of them are outdated. Then you're a few hundred lines in with workarounds, DBUS declarations…
Sad to see the Nix team can't get UX right.
Their technology is on point.
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#4As a fish user interested in Nix this put me off looking into it.
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#5> At this point I had a home.nix that spanned a couple of thousand lines. This is a bad idea, mostly because it's hard to manage. This has also been my experience with home-manager. The promise is great - it's like DLC for Nix that just Does More™. Then you get into it, and realize the modules are a lot more fragile and most of them are outdated. Then you're a few hundred lines in with workarounds, DBUS declarations…
Sad to see the Nix team can't get UX right. Their technology is on point.
Ironically, the Nix team is the one providing the best UX to me. It's more that many community solutions are stale and broken, despite being well-made and thoughtfully designed. I'd like to make home-manager work for me, but I struggle to in practice.
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#6If I understand it right, https://getfleek.dev/ will turn a simpler yaml config into home-manager/nix/flake config. Might be a simpler way to get started.
Haven't started down into the Nix abyss myself though…
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#7Well this is enough to put anyone off Nix. Such a shame because the abstract idea is obviously a good one. But every time Nix/NixOS comes up the story is the same.
Terrible UX. Terrible documentation.
Is Guix any better?
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#8As a fish user interested in Nix this put me off looking into it.
As a fish user on NixOS, I'd say nix is still worth looking at.
The fish-related issues came from trying to manage the whole of the fish configuration with Nix.
I think that's a fairly niche thing to want to do.
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#9> Home-manager needs to add a channel to install it. This will not do.
FWIW, I see that nix-portable does support nix flakes, and home-manager also supports nix flakes. (And flakes are a feature which replaces use of channels).
Re: NixOS and my descent into insanity
#10Well this is enough to put anyone off Nix. Such a shame because the abstract idea is obviously a good one. But every time Nix/NixOS comes up the story is the same. Terrible UX. Terrible documentation. Is Guix any better?
My Guix experience wasn't great. IMHO the people that love it will give you a non realistic view of it, so I recommend you listening to those that didn't like it that much but still like it.
I installed it on Debian, and there's no uninstall. Sure, at that point I was already frustrated, but IMHO that's just a sample. It wasn't for me.