NixOS and my descent into insanity

https://ersei.net/en/blog/its-nixin-time

by yarapavan • 3 years ago

109 118 3 years ago

smoldesu3• 3 years ago

At this point I had a home.nix that spanned a couple of thousand lines. This is a bad idea, mostly because it's hard to manage.

This has also been my experience with home-manager. The promise is great - it's like DLC for Nix that just Does More™. Then you get into it, and realize the modules are a lot more fragile and most of them are outdated. Then you're a few hundred lines in with workarounds, DBUS declarations and all sorts of declarative ricing and go "is it worth it?".

Since then I just removed all the home-manager stuff and relied on NixOS' native config. Things are much more stable and easier to define, and I haven't found a whole lot of things that are truly undoable without it. It's slower and non-declarative, sure, but my sanity is all the better for it. I hope I'm not the only one out there.

k__• 3 years ago

Sad to see the Nix team can't get UX right.

Their technology is on point.

smoldesu3• 3 years ago

Ironically, the Nix team is the one providing the best UX to me. It's more that many community solutions are stale and broken, despite being well-made and thoughtfully designed. I'd like to make home-manager work for me, but I struggle to in practice.

CuriousCosmic• 3 years ago

There's a massive push to improve UX but it'll take time for things to happen and it's only really just in the last few years that nix has gained the popularity in industry for there to be more than just a few groups spending engineering hours towards improving things.

SuperSandro20002• 3 years ago

Well, for most other distro you also Google around and back someone together all the time, we just got used to it.

theLiminator• 3 years ago

I want to try nix, but honestly can't justify the time investment when pop_os just works for me.

esafak• 3 years ago

As a fish user interested in Nix this put me off looking into it.

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

As a fish user on NixOS, I'd say nix is still worth looking at.

The fish-related issues came from trying to manage the whole of the fish configuration with Nix.

I think that's a fairly niche thing to want to do.

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

But isn’t that the Nix promise? That I can have a fully reproducible system defined by a few configuration files?

aidenn0• 3 years ago

Just don't use home-manager and you'll be fine. I've been using NixOS for 5 years and still haven't gotten around to trying home-manager.

unshavedyak8• 3 years ago

I have tons of complaints about Nix lang itself, but i actually got Home Manager working fairly quickly. I use Flakes, not sure if that helps though. I also don't recreate all my configs in Nix unless they absolutely need to be very programmable for some reason.

drunner• 3 years ago

You can always take the easy way out and just symlink stuff. This is what I actually prefer. Then I can edit those files in their native format and just check the updates into my .config/home-manager git repo

    home.file.".gitconfig".source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./dotfiles/git/.gitconfig;
    xdg.configFile."nvim" = {
        recursive = true;
        source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./dotfiles/nvim;
    };

ElCapitanMarkla• 3 years ago

I prefer this approach for most of my configs. Saves having to look up options how to set options in two places.

zellyn• 3 years ago

If I understand it right, https://getfleek.dev/ will turn a simpler yaml config into home-manager/nix/flake config. Might be a simpler way to get started.

Haven't started down into the Nix abyss myself though…

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

https://www.jetpack.io/devbox converts a simple json config into a nix dev environment.

klysm2• 3 years ago

YAML appears simpler but usually isn’t if you want to do anything hard

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

Well this is enough to put anyone off Nix. Such a shame because the abstract idea is obviously a good one. But every time Nix/NixOS comes up the story is the same.

Terrible UX. Terrible documentation.

Is Guix any better?

reidrac• 3 years ago

My Guix experience wasn't great. IMHO the people that love it will give you a non realistic view of it, so I recommend you listening to those that didn't like it that much but still like it.

I installed it on Debian, and there's no uninstall. Sure, at that point I was already frustrated, but IMHO that's just a sample. It wasn't for me.

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

Over half the blogpost is the user describing how they were able to get nix set up on a machine they don't have admin permissions to, and had a 4 GiB disk quota limit.

Those constraints don't really apply if you have admin control of your machine.

(And the troubles in the first half were caused by zealously diving deeper with Nix, after an initial simple setup went well).

rowanG077• 3 years ago

I tried and found it even worse. Impenetrable language, worse documentation, less packages unless you use nixpkgs anyway...

markstos3• 3 years ago

Ironically, there are lots of blog posts documenting how people worked around the poor documentation, but seemingly few fixes being made in the upstream docs themselves.

The excellent Arch Linux Wiki demonstrates that high-quality community-maintained docs are possible.

takeda9• 3 years ago

I think the problem is people are assuming that Nix is just one another tool.

In reality Nix is a programming language. It is a relatively simple language, but it is also functional and lazily evalated. And while the language is simple, its stdlib (nixpkgs) is actually puts another abstraction layer on top of it which is quite complex.

I do think though that Nix should do the same thing other programming languages do: identify what the nix stdlib is, move it to a separate repo with its own release schedule and ensure that whatever is added to it/removed from it is documented.

This won't help author of this blog, but it would be a great help for anyone who is willing to go through Nix Pills.

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

Home-manager needs to add a channel to install it. This will not do.

FWIW, I see that nix-portable does support nix flakes, and home-manager also supports nix flakes. (And flakes are a feature which replaces use of channels).

unshavedyak8• 3 years ago

Yea, i'm using home manager with flakes. Though i forget what initial setup is like. I've found bootstrapping new systems to be a bit odd with Nix + Flakes.

jm42• 3 years ago

NixOS is awful except for everything else out there. The learning curve is... steep. The documentation sucks. You have to learn a new OS because a lot of your prior Linux knowledge no longer applies.

But, man, it's so slick when you get it working. It's so easy to understand your system and how it's set up. There's no weird stuff changing between updates that you don't know about. You don't have to merge new configurations. It's so easy to try something new without changing your system. Rollbacks are awesome. It's easy to move your config to a new machine or keep multiple machines in sync. My machines were constantly getting out of sync as far as packages, versions, config, etc. and it was a headache to maintain them all the way I like. Not anymore. It's so easy to maintain working NixOS systems. I have the same packages, users, and config on my machines without having to think about it. I have automatic updates going where I get a new system when I reboot. It basically works like an appliance I don't have to think about except it's set up the way I want it instead of how someone else decided it should work.

There are so many nice things about NixOS, but it sucks. It's the worst thing out there except for everything else. I hate it and I feel like I can't go back either. I would love a NixOS-like system with a better language, documentation on par with Arch, and the reliability of Debian.

SuperSandro20002• 3 years ago

Prior Linux knowledge still applies and is required, it is just managed differently.

Another language won't change much.

Debian reliability is outside of core packages a myth and Debian has no way to properly migrate configuration. Every major update is a wild rollercoaster ride were things might break in the middle.

textread• 3 years ago

Another language won't change much.

Why do you think Guix+Guile isnt a substantial positive change?

FireInsight• 3 years ago

I use uBlue https://universal-blue.org/ with a custom image. It's basically Fedora Silverblue & co, except I can declare my default packages and Flatpaks and stuff in a YML file and then just rebase to the custom image that was built. I use Nix home-manager for configuring my shell and GTK, and plan to do as much with it as possible. It's genuinely one of the most stable feeling Linux systems I've run, especially with the Nvidia drivers being built in the cloud and my computer just getting the latest version automatically. Being Fedora, it's very up-to-date and uses new technologies like Wayland and Pipewire out of the box.

pkulak2• 3 years ago

Once Nix can install without disabling selinix, it could be holy grail territory.

I personally moved from UBlue to NixOS because I was a bit bored of running my whole life in Distrobox, and didn’t like being so dependent on GitHub. NixOS gives me everything I liked from Silverblue with the flexibility of something like Arch. Plus, Home Manager is amazing. The big downside of container-based images is that you can never touch your home directory. Now instead of Silverblue plus Chezmoi plus like 7 Bash scripts and a Distrobox, it’s all just one Nix config.

jamespwilliams• 3 years ago

I agree that NixOS (and Nix) is difficult to learn and the documentation is generally poor, which I realise is what you’re getting at in your comment,

But I do think we should keep in mind what an incredible project NixOS is. NixOS isn’t just some other Linux distro, repeating pretty much what every distro has done for 40 years. It’s a complete rethink of how a Linux distribution and package manager should work, from first principles, in a way that I don’t think has ever been done before. That’s an incredibly bold thing to do. That alone, as a research project, would be an impressive achievement. But it hasn’t just ended up as some researcher’s PhD thesis. It works in the real world, and it’s built a large community despite its learning curve.

So despite the terrible docs and UX, I have trouble agreeing that it “sucks”!

Joker_vD2• 3 years ago

It would probably function way smoother if it didn't have to be built on top of Linux. But then nobody would use it, of course.

jm42• 3 years ago

Oh, I agree. It's why I put up with NixOS. I love what I can accomplish with it. It's a tool for making your own distro. It basically makes the impossible possible. What I'd like to see now is to make the difficult things easy.

SkyMarshal3• 3 years ago

It’s a complete rethink of how a Linux distribution and package manager should work, from first principles, in a way that I don’t think has ever been done before.

Not just Linux but the OS in general.

Joker_vD2• 3 years ago

I can now see why someone's quipped that the promise of NixOS is that "it will change everything but mutate nothing".

unshavedyak8• 3 years ago

I'm currently trying (and failing, lol) to switch to Nickel Nix. Nix OS/Pkgs is just amazing, but i'm near being entirely done with Nix Lang. Lazy + Dynamic is just a recipe for an awful developer experience.

As far as i can tell no one (thus far) has been able to explain a reasonable and concrete way to tell what any given variable is within a Nix source file. `nix repl` works decently for some cases, but many not - since it seems to mostly help you inspect the output of a Nix expression. So hypothetically it could work, but for any given variable you'd have to recreate the entire value/function/etc stack that produced that value in that state.

All around after ~16 months i think i'm finally done with Nix. It's Nickel or the highway for me. Not that i even love Nickel that much, but it's the bare bones of what Nix should have been in my view.

Not sure if it's a hot take or not.. but it feels like you can have Lazy or Dynamic, but never both. The DX is terrible with both.

anon291• 3 years ago

What the nix language needs is support for first-class breakpoint instructions.

That is, I ought to be able to do something along the lines of

`let x = break (...)`

The semantics here is that, when x is evaluated (i.e., forced into WHNF), I get placed into a debugger where I can examine the context and either (1) choose to return a new value for `x` or (2) let it fall through and let `x` take on the value of `(...)`. The main issue with nix is debuggability

ochoseis2• 3 years ago

I tend to agree. I was trying to follow the guide on how to install NixOS with root-on-zfs[0]. I’ve followed it before with my own tweaks just fine, but recently it was updated to include some random guy’s modules that automate a couple steps. They’re mostly shallow abstractions on first-party NixOS modules, but following it was such a pain. I’ve been putting off reverse engineering the guy’s code so I can understand exactly what it’s doing. Apart from the code quality, it would probably be a lot easier to see what was going on in a typed language, with a debugger. Hopefully one day it gets there.

[0] https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Nix...

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

For building packages, don't you kind of need it to be lazy? I don't want to compile and install all of nixpkgs.

kaba05• 3 years ago

has been able to explain a reasonable and concrete way to tell what any given variable is within a Nix source file

That’s the problem with the anemic and ad hoc libraries nixpkgs uses, not the language. There is a magic buildWhateverXPackage function that needs some magic attributes and you are done. The problem is that there is no interface to aid in how that should be used - but it is the same way in JavaScript as well.

Also, you are writing a description of something, it won’t be a traditional program with an event loop or whatnot - here lazyness does make sense.

von_lohengramm• 3 years ago

As far as i can tell no one (thus far) has been able to explain a reasonable and concrete way to tell what any given variable is within a Nix source file. `nix repl` works decently for some cases, but many not - since it seems to mostly help you inspect the output of a Nix expression. So hypothetically it could work, but for any given variable you'd have to recreate the entire value/function/etc stack that produced that value in that state.

It's certainly not ergonomic, but from what I can tell so far, `builtins.trace` and `builtins.traceVerbose` are about as good as it's gonna get. It quite literally lets you inspect any arbitrary Nix expression, but it's just such a friggin' hassle to wrap things with it & reevaluate just to do what literally any real debugger can do in two keystrokes.

All around after ~16 months i think i'm finally done with Nix. It's Nickel or the highway for me. Not that i even love Nickel that much, but it's the bare bones of what Nix should have been in my view.

I'm curious. Have you messed around with Dhall? It's suspiciously similar to Nickel (even mentioned on their site), but it's been around longer so it's probably a bit more viable to actually make your config in Dhall. Dhall or Nickel, it'll still insanely janky and more trouble than it's worth. Personally, I've found that what's worked surprisingly well for me is just really focusing on building a good understanding of the Nix language in an effort to avoid needing to debug as much as possible. "Just don't write bugs" as the saying goes. I've been using Nix for a while, and I'm still loath to debug it.

takeda9• 3 years ago

Have you tried https://github.com/nickel-lang/nickel-nix ?

I didn't use it yet, but looks like this supposed to do it.

MuffinFlavored3• 3 years ago

You have to learn a new OS because a lot of your prior Linux knowledge no longer applies.

This is what confused me the most.

Nix (CLI tools / language syntax)

NixOS (A Linux distro that has CLI tools, but also some CLI tools that are only available on this distro and not others, aka "nix" doesn't really work on Debian)

Flakes vs "configuration"

I just wanted to like "terraform apply" a system configuration on my Debian install.

People are obsessed with Nix because you can manage your config for their local system

Ok... Ansible has existed for 12 years? And you can use it on Debian/don't need a full OS/distro from the ground up (NixOS)

But people will come out of the woodworks to tell you how you don't understand, you're wrong, you're missing the point, Nix is the greatest.

whateveracct2• 3 years ago

Ansible does not even begin to accomplish what Nix does.

quadrifoliate• 3 years ago

Genuine question: If Ansible on Debian works perfectly for your use cases, why are you checking out Nix/NixOS at all?

I am also mostly an Ansible-on-Debian user, and know for a fact that NixOS has a few things that might be interesting to me in the future. But I don't want to be yet another person "coming out of the woodwork" :) But for a lot of people, Ansible-on-Debian should solve their problems pretty well!

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

I just wanted to like "terraform apply" a system configuration on my Debian install.

I think 'like Terraform, but for the system configuration' is an apt description of NixOS. -- i.e. NixOS is a Linux distribution built around using Nix to generate the system config.

The Nix package manager itself happily works on other Linux distributions. (And on macOS).

... Ansible ...

Nix's main focus is on packages. It happens to incidentally do package-related stuff quite well, which is why nix also gets used to declare development environments, build Docker/VM images, or used to configure NixOS.

An interesting set of terms related to Ansible vs NixOS: Ansible is 'congruent', in that it tries to get a system to a desired state by comparing what's there with what it expects. Whereas, NixOS is 'congruent', in that the system is built to be in the desired state.

https://flyingcircus.io/blog/thoughts-on-systems-management-...

fsflover5• 3 years ago

NixOS is awful except for everything else out there.

Except Qubes OS that allows using original GNU/Linux distributions virtualized with a convenient interface.

processunknown• 3 years ago

I don’t associate convenience and QubesOS. Maybe convenient security, but thats about it.

kaba05• 3 years ago

And what exactly do you run as those distributions? They will have all the same problems.

That’s the same idea that Docker has — containers don’t solve packaging, they only push the problem down a layer.

__MatrixMan__2• 3 years ago

I have enjoyed using Qubes in the past, it's definitely a cool feeling having everything controllable via an abstraction that its author probably wasn't designing for. Feels powerful.

But at the end of the day, those VM images, and any snapshots made, are opaque blobs of bits. Whatever shape they're in, you have nowhere to look to determine why they are the way they are--no recipe for recreating that state and sharing it with others (unless you want to share it ALL with others, and then only with others on the same architecture). You've got a lot of control, but only over these chunks of whatever happened to be there at that time.

You're sort of trapped in one dimension. You can use snapshots to move backwards and forwards in time, but if the following paths don't lead to the same system state in some subtle way you're not going to know about the difference:

path one:

add foo | add bar | remove foo

path two:

add bar

SkyMarshal3• 3 years ago

with a better language, documentation on par with Arch, and the reliability of Debian.

I grok the first two, but what do you mean about the reliability of Debian?

eternityforest• 3 years ago

NixOS looks like just about the only sane option besides containerizing everything like Snaps and flatpacks, which seems to also suck.

I used to love Linux, about 10 years ago, but it seems to be stagnating.

Stuff basically never breaks on Android, so it's clear you can totally make a computer that actually works. But even mint occasionally has random fussy problems, and so much of the internals are built around manual admin.

I mean, debian packages can randomly decide they need to ask a question during setup!

Plus Nix seems to have modern packages. Other linuxes have a huge repo, but a lot of it is nonsense, unmaintained, or obsolete, or something only of interest to unix fans. With nix ever fairly obscure stuff that normally needs a ppa seems to be there.

benreesman• 3 years ago

Le sigh, another day, another group of people turned off on NixOS for completely legitimate learning curve, documentation, and support reasons that are nonetheless heartbreakingly fixable. It’s never the user’s fault.

Home manager is a well-intentioned and technically well-executed piece of software that is nonetheless a disaster as the “how to do dots on Nix” story, especially for newcomers. We need “Home Manager Light” or something.

I’m a fucking serious Nix-head and I procrastinate doing anything serious to my dots like getting a root canal.

skulk2• 3 years ago

On the contrary for me, playing around with nix and nixos is how I procrastinate everything. It's incredibly effective.

jahsome3• 3 years ago

I find nix incredible but the thing that I struggle with is trying to figure out how to do things on nixpkgs, and home manager in particular while not using nixos.

This is a critical use case for the apprehensive crowd like me who is averse to distro hopping, let alone willing to take on the paradigm shift of Linux-to-nixos.

The documentation for either is all but non-existent and the pages I can find are glorified source or man pages. Given how scalable nix, in the right use case, can make things, that's just not the modern experience it should or could be.

rch• 3 years ago

Nixpkgs is also critical for non-apprehensive people who nonetheless need to use MacOS and other distros on a daily basis.

taffit• 3 years ago

I completely agree. I'm also trying to wrap my head around Nix on a non-NixOS system. My requirements are to just manage my dotfiles (successful with home-manager) and configuring my system/installing certain packages, so everyone on the host can e. g. start a docker container with Docker installed by Nix. Ideally all with flakes.

I suppose, I can't have the second part without NixOS, though ...

markstos3• 3 years ago

I like YADM for managing my dot files and expect that even if I switched to NixOS, I would keep using it because it works well and I have no complaints about it.

misnome• 3 years ago

My favorite was going through the Nix reference manual. Section 4.2, Profiles

If the profile doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically.

Nope! If it doesn't exist then running the commands this tells you to will bork your installation completely, and unrecoverably with the knowledge you have gained up until that point in the book, at least without starting from scratch again.

Search for issue - closed in 2018, wontfix as "It's documented correctly and quite clearly." by someone who apparently didn't read or understand that the literal reference manual tells people to break their installation.

I have never touched Nix/NixOS since, because clearly they don't want or need people without 100% of their lives to dedicate themselves to it.

skulk2• 3 years ago

It looked cool, and I was getting kinda sick of Zsh being slow in big Git repositories.

Sorry, what? If your zsh is slow in a big git repository, that's on you, not zsh. I honestly have a hard time taking anything else in this article seriously after reading that.

edit: the article is good. I was being harsh. Nix is horrible, and yet I refuse to use anything else.

aendruk• 3 years ago

The author acknowledges this in the next sentence. A charitable reading would be that “Zsh” means “my Zsh”.

I was getting kinda sick of [my Zsh] being slow in big Git repositories. Instead of fixing [my Zsh], I decided to give Fish a shot.

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

That’s a shame because the rest of it was pretty insightful and descends into a deep hole of interesting hopelessness. I think you took things too seriously, they clearly are lark hunting - which is beautiful to watch because that’s where learning happens.

femiagbabiaka• 3 years ago

Yep, UX is a terrible issue. FWIW, I went through this too and after swapping to flakes and getting familiar with the ecosystem, I feel like I just "get it" more. There are still idiosyncracies of the language and the magic that is done in Nix core libraries that are frustrating to work through, but for 99% of daily tasks I feel better. I had a similar learning curve with Rust. It's worth it for me! So tl;dr don't be too put off by the learning curve, it's not impossible, just more than it should be.

bouchardm• 3 years ago

NixOS is by far the most stable piece of software I used.

Yeah, it can be hard to get something working, but once you do, you can be sure it will work anywhere.

pcwelder• 3 years ago

Would Chatgpt help in accelerating the learning process? Does it understand Nix well enough to be useful?

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

My experience has been it generally does but not with newer more emergent things like flakes.

markstos3• 3 years ago

I tried using Google Bard, another LLM for learning Rust, and it had no awareness that solutions were specific to certain versions of software. So it would give me confidently wrong solutions for outdated versions of the software.

Macha• 3 years ago

There is one notable exception to programs I am not managing with home-manager, and that's SSH. Although it's pretty easy to use home-manager to manage SSH configurations, I'd prefer the security-through-obscurity of people not knowing my SSH aliases (since, y'know, I'm making my nix configuration public).

Tip I use for this:

End your ~/.ssh/config with Include ~/.ssh/config.local . Write ~/.ssh/config with whatever you're happy being public. Write your aliases into ~/.ssh/config.local. SSH will just ignore it if it's missing.

mohsenari• 3 years ago

Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

DrDroop• 3 years ago

This is a shame to read, I've thought of learning Nix for basic devops tasks and avoid tools like Ansible. Is this critique true for Nix in general or just NixOS?

aliasxneo2• 3 years ago

As with anything, "it depends." I think Nix and NixOS is great for personal and hobby stuff, but I cannot in good faith recommend it for anything professional. I personally run my daily driver on NixOS and haven't had any desire to change, but I'd prefer to never have to write an actual line of Nix code again.

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

I cannot in good faith recommend it for anything professional.

What separates the professional from the 'personal and hobby stuff': the need for (timely) reliability, and that you want other people to be able to maintain it.

With Nix, because it's so strict, it's more difficult to quickly kludge a solution. If something doesn't work as you expect, it may demand understanding of different parts of the solution stack.

That Nix isn't widely adopted means it's harder to find e.g. StackOverflow answers for problems.

In the blogpost, an example of a problem they had to work around was that fish's configuration expected to work statefully in a way which didn't work well with Nix's Home Manager's declarative nature.

ParetoOptimal• 3 years ago

Well... note that this is a critique but the conclusion encourages using Nix anyway. The whole "Nix sucks but everything else sucks worse" idea.

takeda9• 3 years ago

To me it sounds like criticism of someone who jumped on it but did not want to read documentation, then also spent second time of the blog trying to have Nix run on an unprivileged account with small quota.

As for devops task, if it is something that you plan to do and many other users already did than it should be fine. If you are not happy with existing solutions and want things done your way, or it is an uncharted territory then you will need to go through the steep learning curve.

rgoulter8• 3 years ago

To me, it reads like the author tried the tool, thought it was really neat, and discusses the problems they ran into (& how they fixed them). Once they got a simple setup that solved their needs, the author was enthusiastic to apply the tool to everything they had. -- Not sure I'd describe that as a 'critique'.

That said, I think the experience is demonstrative.

When Nix works, it's amazing, & you'll want to have Nix everywhere.

When something goes wrong with what you're trying to do, Nix can be very challenging, and will typically demand you have a good understanding of what's going on (with what you're trying to do, with Linux, with Nix in order to fix it.

smasher1642• 3 years ago

I don't really have a need for home-manager on a single-user NixOS system. Whatever configuration home-manager would typically manage is now contained in my global configuration.nix.

kaba05• 3 years ago

Home-manager has a lot of options for configuring packages available through it though. You have to manually write config files in your global configuration.nix for “what color should be the fg in this terminal”, while home-manager will provide an attribute even for that.

Also, you can use home-manager from within your configuration.nix, that’s how I use it! Then you don’t have to deal with it separately and everything is at one place.

smasher1642• 3 years ago

Yeah, I admit that home-manager is already decked out with all of these options. There's some more manual effort that goes into using configuration.nix here. That being said, I've been seeing more software being packaged up as nixos modules. For example, you can configure a git installation globally now.

takeda9• 3 years ago

I'm a single user and still use home-manager. And I wouldn't be surprised that's the majority of cases.

The thing is that while NixOS configuration.nix also contains modules for software, it primarily concentrates on global services and might not have modules for programs that are meant to be run under user.

takeda9• 3 years ago

Feels like the problem people have is they are approaching Nix as a tool, instead of a programming language. I see author just dismissed tutorial, because it was "too technical" for him. I think if you don't have patience to get through nix pills, nix is likely not for you. You won't have enough patience.

Also few things:

- he decided to manage sway via home-manager, then got suprprised that after he made changes to its configuration and run "home-manager switch" it restarted the service

- when searching for installing nix on another machine, he tried nix-user-chroot, nix-portable, proot. He pointed out that nix-user-chroot is abandoned. The reason is that it is no longer needed, what he wanted to do can be done with statically built nix[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/6Le0IbPRzOE?t=4282 - I recommend watching the whole video (especially once he starts doing demo at 14 minutes) as you can do a lot of things you might not even know it was possible.

klysm2• 3 years ago

Last time I did nix things, the language docs were not good. I’m fairly comfortable bashing my head into hard things for long periods of time but it was very hard to squeeze answers out of the internet.

takeda9• 3 years ago

For me it took some time. Finishing Nix Pills was enough knowledge to start looking into nix and nixpkgs manual and understanding it.

I still get frustrated that some new features that are being added are undocumented, though I also noticed that the nixpkgs documentation by default is set to last stable version. This means changes could be delayed by even 6 months. And given how rapidly nixpkgs change that could be the reason.

rewgs• 3 years ago

I'm 100% sold on the idea that the Nix model is, generally, the best way forward. But time and time again I hear the same thing: the documentation and UX suck.

Until I hear differently, I'm just gonna stick with my battle-tested shell scripts and symlinks. Sure, it's not the same degree of reproducibility, but also I've not yet had a practical reason to need whatever remaining percentage of the diminishing returns Nix offers that I'm not getting, at least when using my scripts combined with the use of other tools such as venv, nvm, cargo, etc, or even just building a lot of software from source.

Niksko• 3 years ago

Not the best thing to see pop up on the day that I'm supposed to get my new work laptop that I plan to nixify using home manager... I guess since I'm going to be running nix inside of MacOS it's a little less disastrous if I have to just pack it in and uninstall.

totallywrong• 3 years ago

I think Nix is cool as a dev tool, but I have near zero interest in NixOS. The newer immutable distros (CoreOS, Silverblue, etc.) get you the actually important features and it's still good old Linux. I'm talking about (easy) declarative config, atomic upgrades, and guaranteed rollbacks. I don't need any more than that.

NixOS and my descent into insanity

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