Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of Developers

Re:Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of De... by ghuntley on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:00PM (#36076164)

The last two years have seen an increased focus on usability, education and polish now that after circa 15 years of establishing solid foundations are in place. All good things in time.

There’s no venture backed cash here paying for the polish that folks typically see in devtools launched in 2023. That polish is expensive to do and isn’t “fun or engaging” for the majority of developers thus classic open source problem of over indexing on serving the needs/existing people who do not need the polish.

There’s some notable call-outs here of folks putting in serious effort such as https://nix.dev ala https://cachix.org out of love for nix to succeed.

Yeah nix wants to grow, and it is, largest bazaar GitHub community/repo out there right now.

starting to see venture backed companies forming who are building the polish as porcelain over the top and giving back. see https://floxdev.com/

at this stage nix is a damn safe bet because of what it can do, the problems it solves and the size of community.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of De... by pxc on Thursday May 25, 2023 @06:38PM (#36077313)

* * *

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of De... by ghuntley on Thursday May 25, 2023 @07:33PM (#36077825)

> In the last few years, Nix has gone from a place where I was sometimes uncomfortable recommending it to people to one where I feel like it would be unstrategic not to use it.

Super agree. Been using nix now for six(?) years and always been advocating for it but hesentiant to recommend companies adopt it (unless you can use it to attract talent as walmart did with nodejs back in the day) however with https://devenv.sh and https://nix.dev in the existence the time to amaze is now measured in < 5 minutes. nixpkgs also partially solves sbom topics, enables monkey patching any linux application/kernel/ffi dependency, has the freshest collection of packages (it's more fresh than archlinux by a major factor) whilst all being under CI/CD (shamefully rare in linux land)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Super Colliding Nix Stores: Nix Flakes for Millions of De... by tomberek on Thursday May 25, 2023 @11:21PM (#36079403)

At flox, we are specifically focusing on those people who are the advocates and bringing Nix into their organizations, teams, and companies. We call them the “Ambassadors”, and want to call out how important that role is in making Nix mainstream. Ideally, it should become the obvious choice - the default choice - where specific reasons need to be provided when not using it.

[ Parent | on HN ]