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I think it's time to give Nix a chance

maych.in

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Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#2

Post by urlwolf »

I 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.

Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#3

Post by zachlatta »

urlwolf wrote: post #2

I 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.

Can you link your dotfiles? I’ve been having trouble figuring out a good way to structure mine

Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#4

Post by TeeMassive »

urlwolf wrote: post #2

I 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.

Until your use case hasn't been deciphered by a Nix scribe and then you have to fight the magic.

Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#6

Post by johnisgood »

TeeMassive wrote: post #4
urlwolf wrote: post #2

I 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.

Until your use case hasn't been deciphered by a Nix scribe and then you have to fight the magic.

Which makes "next to zero time wasted configuring things" false, very much so. You will have to write your own derivation(s) using Nix[1].

In any case, from the article, what does not apply to Guix, too? I am leaning towards Guix because of its language (Scheme, i.e. Lisp-y), but I wonder about the differences between the two, today (besides userbase and hype).

[1] https://nix.dev/tutorials/nix-language.html

Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#7

Post by krapht »

I tried to give Nix a chance but I never figured out how to package dependencies that didn't already have a derivation written for them.

Particularly since I do a lot of ML work - I never figured out how to handle mixed Python/C++ code with dependencies on CUDA.

It's just way easier, even if not reproducible, to build an environment imperatively in Docker.

Re: I think it's time to give Nix a chance

#8

Post by bigyabai »

TeeMassive wrote: post #4
urlwolf wrote: post #2

I 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.

Until your use case hasn't been deciphered by a Nix scribe and then you have to fight the magic.

I guess relentlessly dylibbed software like AppImage is the elephant in the room. Nix struggles to handle those types of programs, but they tend to work fine in Flatpak or with a special tool (eg. appimage-run or steam-run).
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