I don't find package managers confusing but I do, in fact, find them overengineered. They solve at most 75% of application management problems with the fallback for the other 25% being "compile it from source yourself" and it takes an army of unpaid third party maintainers to pull that off.

In my current estimation, Nix just solves an additional 5% at the cost of exponentially more overengineering.

> You probably don't have a problem that this solves.

> They find software repositories and package managers confusing and overengineered.

The screenshot is literally a mishmash of technical jargon with little to no relation to each other.

sound.enable defined boolean asset resource enabled.

What problem does it solve, exactly?

If you think the words software repository and package manager are esoteric technical jargon then you don't need nix, which is completely fine. But it allows developers to identically reproduce builds of a software which depends on other software packages. Other package managers may depend on some global variables of your system, which nix avoids.

That's like asking "what problem does apt-get solve, exactly, with its technical jargon, when I can always download the software I want using Google Chrome?"

Yeah but here it's the level of jargon that is the problem, there is too much! This is a good project for sure but it is not ready for new users.

Honestly, that's so patronising I wonder if you are trolling?

I use Debian and Redhat happily, also do plenty of Docker. I really want to love Nix and have tried a few times (even submitting some package updates), but just kept bouncing off it and giving up.

Good for you. That means you haven't encountered a problem that Nix is designed to solve.

(Nix is very much a "worse is better" tool in the tradition of hacking something together out of existing tools until you a minimal working product. It's designed to solve a particular class of problems quickly and painlessly, even if the end result isn't "clean" or "elegant". The "clean" and "elegant" solutions to these problems are vastly more complex and overengineered.)

I believe I have a problem Nix is designed to solve (reproducible builds) all the time. However, one can work around it with enough pain and suffering on Ubuntu (I can write a shell script to download and build the specific GCC, GHC, rustc and other packages I need and build from source where required), and still find that much easier to distribute to my colleagues, rather than having to teach them to use Nix.

What else is Nix good for? I'd be interested to know.

Nix allows you to abstract over your shell scripts. Like pack those fuckers in a derivation and now people can install them with Nix in a uniform way (and compose them with their own packages) instead of manually shell scripting.

You can even use a single overlay to add a namespace to your company's nixpkgs, which will then allow your colleagues to discover all the versions of all those tools with nix repl

    > pkgs.CJefferson.ghc<TAB>

and boom! All the GHC versions you've worked hard to package across branches and repos etc will be at their fingertips.

As is always the case with FP, composition and abstraction is the big longterm win with Nix. No other comparable tool comes close on those axes.

>They find software repositories and package managers confusing and overengineered.

And that's why big distros have created GUIs (e.g. Ubuntu's software center) that truly hide any technicalities. Nix-GUI, as it's now, will instead be more like Synaptic, it kinda makes life easier but you still require technical knowledge to use it.