I know they're kind of experimental still, but I have personally found Nix Flakes a lot more fun to work with, at least once I sat down and actually learned about them. I feel the interface is more consistent, and it gives me the "replacing docker" experience with the ability to make devshells and ephemeral builds.
Granted, I'm not running Nixos on my main laptop, because I have had a hell of a time getting me 2020 Macbook to get Linux running stably, but I do use Nix as my sole package manager within MacOS, and I do run NixOS on my server and use Flakes heavily there.
I went down the rabbit hole and now feel comfortable claiming I do understand both the programming language and the NixOS module system, which is effectively an embedded DSL, as well as a decent chunk of the nixpkgs conventions.
And it certainly is a great feeling, but I'm not yet sure it's really "worth it". Of course the effect is great, but it was also an enormous amount of work to get there.
Re:Fedora Atomic Desktops
by darthrupert on Saturday February 10, 2024 @01:27AM
(#39324086)
Generally speaking, you should never learn a language. You should use a language and let learning happen.
I'm happy in the sense that its simple enough that I can install programs and do all the other usual desktop stuff with minimal knowledge. But I'm unhappy in the sense that when I started with nixos I wanted to replace docker and docker-compose. I still haven't accomplished that.
But all-in-all I'm very happy with Nixos for desktop use. No crashes, no bugs. Its the reason I was able to permanently drop Windows.