Linux

I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!

But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it's easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn't mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I'm going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don't want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here's how you configure it. Here's how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn't figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.

I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can't recommend this to my tech friends because if I'm confused they will be more so.

The Nix language itself is the hardest part.

Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just : (e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.

The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a services.foobar.enable = true and sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing that https://search.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.

There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.

I really feel compelled to share that I actually really fucking love nix. I've never felt so confident that my computer would turn on no problem. It was hard and it was rewarding.

Idk I guess I haven't had it for long but once I got my dotfiles the way I like I just stopped messing with it.

Also nix devshells are pretty dope (⁠◕⁠ᴗ⁠◕⁠✿⁠)

NixOS sounds like ansible in OS form and that has never seemed appealing. Happy to hear why my impression is wrong though!

It's missing the fact that the nix store can be huge, even if garbage collected regularly. This prevents me from using nix on my Ubuntu laptop with limited HDD space.

I have not used Nix, so I may not know what I am talking about.

That said, I have been using Chimera Linux which uses the APK package manager. It works by maintaining a single file in /etc/apk/world that specifies all the packages the user wants on the system. This is used to calculate dependencies and install packages. When you “add” and “del” packages, all it is really doing is adding and removing from this list. If you remove a package, it will remove all the dependencies too unless they appear in the “world” file.

If you do not specify a version number for a package, you get the latest. But you can pin versions of you want.

If you copy the world file from one system to another, you get the same set of installed packages.

So, if I use git to backup my world file, maybe a couple of other entries in /etc, and the dot files in my home directory, I have pretty much everything I need to completely recreate my system.

Is it really worth all the extra complexity of Nix?

If you download a binary you can just steam-run it and it just works