Re:Nix-GUI: Make NixOS usable for non-technical users throug...
by mindslight on Sunday October 10, 2021 @10:27AM
(#28818680)
Kind of orthogonal to your questions, but perhaps it helps:
NixOS solves OS-level issues. If you don't appreciate that you're having them, or you're solving them by other means, you might not see the appeal.
I tried NixOS on three separate occasions before it stuck. My existing setup is based on Debian and templating config files across machines (small heterogeneous network). This system can rebuild any machine from a blank slate, and so the first two times I tried NixOS I didn't see what it could give me - my configuration was already quite declarative and centralized.
The third time trying NixOS, I was aiming to make an image for a Raspberry Pi (after a Raspbian apt-get upgrade had borked a system once again). Seeing that I could make a full build from source, cross compiled or emulation compiled, with a few lines in a config file made it all click. It felt reminiscent of the Lisp curse where such a thing isn't well documented, because it's just second nature once you understand the system. I've only felt that level of paradigm changing expressive power a few times, and NixOS was one of them.
What is keeping me heading in the NixOS direction is the greater source accessibility. I've run Debian for 20+ years, and I still don't routinely modify existing packages. Whereas with Nix it's second nature because it's essentially a source distribution.
NixOS solves OS-level issues. If you don't appreciate that you're having them, or you're solving them by other means, you might not see the appeal.
I tried NixOS on three separate occasions before it stuck. My existing setup is based on Debian and templating config files across machines (small heterogeneous network). This system can rebuild any machine from a blank slate, and so the first two times I tried NixOS I didn't see what it could give me - my configuration was already quite declarative and centralized.
The third time trying NixOS, I was aiming to make an image for a Raspberry Pi (after a Raspbian apt-get upgrade had borked a system once again). Seeing that I could make a full build from source, cross compiled or emulation compiled, with a few lines in a config file made it all click. It felt reminiscent of the Lisp curse where such a thing isn't well documented, because it's just second nature once you understand the system. I've only felt that level of paradigm changing expressive power a few times, and NixOS was one of them.
What is keeping me heading in the NixOS direction is the greater source accessibility. I've run Debian for 20+ years, and I still don't routinely modify existing packages. Whereas with Nix it's second nature because it's essentially a source distribution.