The Curse of NixOS

Re:The Curse of NixOS by nextos on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:14PM (#30065487)

Have you looked into Guix? In some ways it's a bit simpler and cleaner because it is a much more recent effort and Scheme is somewhat easier. It might help with the learning process in case you disliked Nix. GuixSD does have some other drawbacks. I'm personally running NixOS but both are very cool.

Nix certainly has a steep curve, but simple things are not that hard. I got committed to migrate to Nix one Monday. I spent the whole morning reading about it. In the afternoon, my workstation was already up and running. On the same evening, I packaged two exotic things I need which weren't on NixPkgs. Next day, I fixed my favorite window manager, which was broken on NixPkgs. I maintain all these on NixPkgs now.

Complicated things are not that easy, and I would not have been able to do all this if I had encountered non-trivial issues in the process. I also totally understand that the learning curve is steep. Nix has too much legacy stuff and cruft built in. There's the classic Nix command, Nix 2.0 and Nix flakes. They are all coexisting and not very well documented. Nix needs more manpower, funding and tooling.

With that said, declarative stuff is poised to be harder for non-trivial stuff. Just like Haskell is harder than C, NixOS is harder than ArchLinux or Alpine. I still very much find it worth the effort for simple workflows. I can now update remote machines without fearing breakdowns and state is very explicit.

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Re:The Curse of NixOS by PoignardAzur on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @08:23AM (#30071476)

> Nix certainly has a steep curve, but simple things are not that hard. I got committed to migrate to Nix one Monday. I spent the whole morning reading about it. In the afternoon, my workstation was already up and running. On the same evening, I packaged two exotic things I need which weren't on NixPkgs. Next day, I fixed my favorite window manager, which was broken on NixPkgs. I maintain all these on NixPkgs now.

I mean... it's great that you did all that, but you do realize that going that far makes you a power user, right?

Most users are going to give up if they can't figure out how to install their window manager or other essential software (eg installing Docker or Steam is ridiculously hard if you don't know that they have special hard-coded config values; it's almost like a game you can only beat if you find the cheat codes).

> With that said, declarative stuff is poised to be harder for non-trivial stuff. Just like Haskell is harder than C, NixOS is harder than ArchLinux or Alpine. I still very much find it worth the effort for simple workflows. I can now update remote machines without fearing breakdowns and state is very explicit.

Hard disagree. I could totally see a world where NixOS is as easy to install as any other distribution. But the developers are going to have to put a lot of work into smoothing out wrinkles before it gets there.

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Re:The Curse of NixOS by petre on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:56AM (#30074231)

I've tried a bootable vm image but couldn't figure out how to configure, the docs only cover the installer, no examples, so I gave up. It seems like it's a Guile recipe for an OS. I want the OS with docs, examples, maybe a simple instalker to get everything bootstrapped. Then I could learn to write recipes. Other than that, Guile is attractive and so is GNU Shepherd, which is why I tried it in the first place.

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