by jack_jennings on 2/23/18, 12:12 AM with 120 comments
by zapita on 2/23/18, 1:15 AM
There are two reasons for my skepticism:
1. User experience. Unless you're one of the "passionate experts", the Nix user experience is pretty terrible. The learning curve is punishing compared to competing systems.
2. Elitist culture. In my experience, the Nix community is too smart for its own good. Their technical foundation is so far ahead of mainstream systems, and their technical design so satisfying to passionate experts, that they've forgotten how to live a day in the shoes of a mere mortal. Try pointing out flaws in the user experience, or the need to offer more pragmatic ways to migrate existing systems, and you will be met mostly with derision and reminders of Nix's superior engineering. But superior engineering is not everything. If you want to spread the amazing potential of Nix to everyone, then you need to compromise with a flawed, imperfect world. You need to meet users half-way, and guide them to the promised land, instead of waiting for them to show up on their own. Otherwise someone will come along that will do it for you.
All this is eerily similar to what happened to functional programming communities.
by vishvananda on 2/23/18, 1:19 AM
Unfortunately, over time I've become quite frustrated with the pull-everything from the internet model. If you are building packages from scratch each time instead of pulling down cached version using the nix command, the build breaks quite often.
Mostly it is silly stuff like the source package disappearing from the net. A particularly egregious offender is the named.root[2] file being updated, which will cause everything to fail to build until the sha is updated in the build def.
I don't know that there is a great solution for this problem. Maybe there needs to be a CI system that does from scratch build of all of the packages every day and automatically files bugs. Alternatively, a cache of sources and not just built packages could ease the pain. This issue probably affects ver few nix users, but it has demoted my love of nix down to "still likes but is somewhat annoyed by".
[1]: https://github.com/oracle/crashcart [2]: https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root
by lukego on 2/23/18, 7:33 AM
I love Nix and I have been looking forward to this new makeover of the UI with the 'nix' command. It seems like the original command line usages developed incrementally over time, making them quirky and inconsistent, and so it is really welcome to have them redone based on long experience. (Thanks, Nix hackers!)
Seeing this released as Nix 2.0 is a really lovely surprise for me this morning :).
by hedning on 2/23/18, 9:11 AM
by Lilian_Lee on 2/23/18, 1:54 AM
This is pretty nice. I've been using nix on my Mac for more than a year now, it works well on mac. But the separated commands are not easy to remember and the help documentation is also separated. This change really improves command line UX
by TremendousT on 2/23/18, 2:11 AM
by bfrog on 2/23/18, 4:20 AM
My other big complaint is that when something goes wrong its damn near impossible to figure it out. Trying to figure out why I couldn't get postgres working with postgis was nightmarish last year sometime when I last tried nixos.
I'm still really optimistic that this will someday replace arch for me. I just don't know when
by thomastjeffery on 2/23/18, 1:35 AM
Hopefully, this means I can stop using the website search for packages.
by thinkpad20 on 2/23/18, 1:27 AM
by canadaduane on 2/23/18, 4:44 AM
by tarruda on 2/23/18, 9:32 AM
- Parallel installation of multiple OSes sharing the same storage pool
- Snapshot/rollback
How does using Nix compare to using a CoW filesystem such as Btrfs or Zfs?
by Ixiaus on 2/23/18, 3:43 AM
by eridius on 2/23/18, 12:43 AM
by alexashka on 2/23/18, 1:25 AM
For basic users who have a DigitalOcean droplet with Ubuntu, to run a web server - how does this compare?