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Comment by peller | Hacker News Reader

To each their own I guess. I strongly prefer their method. It let's me set up my system exactly how I want without having to fight with some GUI installer to make sure it doesn't do anything stupid. And hey, you might even learn a thing or two about how an OS works - partitions, boot loaders, init systems, it's all really quite important to understand when things go wrong and you need to recover your system manually.

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I'm fine with setting up my boxes with Debian Installer and its preseed way, and it's straight forward and too easy to configure. But Nix is something else.

Learning how an OS works really is not quite important, except for a very small minority concerned with that field. That defeats the entire purpose of an OS, which is to provide an easy to use interface between hardware and software. I can't imagine telling anyone in my family this, and having them take me seriously. If they even understand what I just said.

And the result is that the general population can't fix even simple issues with their computers, and not even reinstall an OS.

Knowledge is great, but ignorance is bliss, I suppose :P

People shouldn't be responsible for knowing how to fix every piece of technology in their life. I doubt Linus could rebuild his car engine. I mean, everyone should know how to fix their ever increasingly complex car right? We have industrialized farming, so we're not spending our entire lives growing our own food, and hunting our own animals. This is how the world works. Should they know the basics of computer usage? Sure. Maybe if reinstalling a computer was one click of a button they should. But NixOS is so far beyond that, I wouldn't touch it either. I've got plenty of other things to work on, rather than fighting with an OS.

I'm not saying everybody needs to know everything about everything, but I'm really not happy about people's lack of IT knowledge in a world that is only getting even more technical.

People really should know just a little bit about stuff they use every day.

Cars have been around a lot longer than home computers have, and yet most people don't change their own oil.

I say this as a NixOS developer-- realistically the audience for a system like NixOS is fairly technical by design. It will likely never receive the kind of polish that would ever satisfy anyone in your family, or possibly even a technical person like yourself! I dislike that, but it's the truth.

Maybe the other developers disagree, but there are already plenty of Linux distributions that try extremely hard to be friendly and gentle, and remove needless technicalities -- and they even make it simple for developers! They could satisfy you or someone else! The developers put a lot of work into them, and that's really fantastic. But we'll probably never beat them at this; our design is a big enough departure from the traditional that it's very difficult to make it transparent. We're better off playing to our own strengths, IMO, rather than trying to polish off every single rough edge for ever user, to do something Linux distros with 10x the users and money, already offer, but better.

It's pretty understandable a lot of people would not like this trade off. I, personally, think NixOS is personally the best Linux distribution there is, of course -- but it's understandable why people would not like it, or these design choices. At all. I don't think I waste as much time as you might expect learning about Linux, but I do spend time doing things you probably wouldn't ever enjoy (like fixing upstream packages...)

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All of this said, we really should have a graphical installer. I'd love one. :) I'm just saying even if we fixed that, it's probably going to be the least of your issues in the long run, more or less... The installer is the tip of the iceberg.

Hey thanks for the response. Of course it's for the target audience, which was my overall message. The person I was responding to was arguing that people in general should know how an OS works, which is complete nonsense.

Rereading my response, I don't think that's at all what I was arguing for. I thought I was quite clear in qualifying the specific situation when I thought it would be helpful to know about lower level details. I'm sorry you interpreted it the way you did.

To be honest, at this point, nix is not for non-technical people. There's little benefit, and the design space hasn't been explored. That being said, nix would make a fantastic basis for a more end-user-oriented system, but the work would need to be put in.

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