I've had the displeasure of being forced to use nix and to me it seems like an overengineered piece of garbage. I don't see why anyone should use this vs competitors
Strictly speaking "Nix" may refer to two things, and I'm not sure which thing either of you are referring to, nor if you two are referring to the same thing.
Personally I found the nix package-manager a bit odd, but to me that was not a deal-breaker for trying out NixOS. The bigeset problem for me was lacking packages... I was however willing to help the community out by trying to package the things I needed which wasn't already provided for.
But then I had to use the Nix language. And that was a great displeasure, and I ended giving up NixOS all together because of this one pain point.
And to address your comment: I think I've seen similar comments on HN at regular intervals. It's definitely not a one-off comment.
If they had used another more standard language (like LISP!) I would probably still be on NixOS as my main OS.
In the long run, I really hope Guix manages to get something good going. My biggest concern for Guix is that they will restrict the available packages by being overly zealous about package-licensing (like everything the FSF does).
Could you articulate why? I have only been using Nix for ~3 months, but so far I do not really have qualms with the Nix language. Maybe it is because I have written a fair bit of Haskell before.
(Of course, I understand the argument that it would have been more comfortable if an existing language like Scheme was used.)
My biggest concern for Guix is that they will restrict the available packages by being overly zealous a bout package-licensing (like everything the FSF does).
Same here. When I got interested in NixOS/GuixSD I seriously considered using GuixSD, because Scheme is more familiar. But there are just some proprietary packages that I need for work (Skype) and at home. I didn't really feel like having to rely on third-party repositories, etc.
I mean... It's not a "real" language in the sense that there exists any tooling, debuggers, unit-test suites or anything.
You write your recipes and try to see if they work. And when they don't you have no idea why.
With a real programming language (like Scheme) I could evaluate something working, compare it to my non-working stuff and probably figure out where it all went wrong. Chances are I could probably expand the macros and debug my way to a solution right within Emacs without ever launching a single external tool.
There's just this huge gap between what you get and what you expect. And with Nix being a one-tricky pony, there's almost zero incentives for the community at large to try bridge that gap.
Guix co-maintainer here. The Guix project is not run by the FSF; it is part of the GNU project, because we subscribe to the idea of giving users the tools to take control of their computing.
Packages available through the official Guix channel must be compliant with the Free System Distribution Guidelines:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
At the institute where I work we're using channels to provide packages that are not available in Guix proper. It's very simple.
For myself (and I suspect many people) when installing GuixSD, before I even have the system running, I'm going to need to figure out how to package the Linux kernel with firmware for my wifi. Otherwise my ~$3k laptop is basically a brick. That is a big ask right up front. Glancing at the mailing list it seems like discussing non-free software is discouraged. Even if there is some well maintained Linux package on Github it would be difficult to find and evaluate before having any experience with Guix.
It is your project and you can obviously have whatever rules you want. It just seems that Guix and Nix made some odd choices that are going to keep both projects in a very small niche.
1. You can uninstall a thing and it will no longer affect your computer.
2. Your environment will work the same way on your colleague's computer.
3. Your environment will work the same way years down the line.
4. Your environment will probably work the same way years down the line, even after you've applied security updates. If it doesn't, it will probably be clear what's broken/different.
5. You can install many different environments on the same machine, and they will probably all work. On the rare occasions where they don't, it will be because they interact with system services or limited system resources, and it will be clearly defined how that happens.
6. All this is true across most programming languages, system services, and all sorts of tools.
7. You can combine this with direnv (or direnv-mode for Emacs) to make it so that you can just cd into a directory and magically get all the dependencies.
8. You can put the recipe for your environment in Git.
Other than Nix and Guix, I don't know of any tool where these things are true. Docker and Virtual Machines get sort of half way, but tend to rot over time.
But yes, it's difficult to learn and in many cases the usability is poor.
Final bonus point:
9. Nix is so good that it can even make Autotools work correctly.
Nix is probably good for many things, but it's not simple and to me it's trying to do too many things.
As soon as any assumption changes, like for example, adding a third-party application repository, then you need to concern yourself with all of the issues mentioned above, or you'll end up wasting your days on manually building and installing packages locally.
The point of Nix is to do this once only. If you build and it runs, it should do the same for everyone, regardless of what other repositories they use. Package management becomes completely modular and does not depend on some centralized state like a central software repository, or the state of your machine at time of install.
Nix isn't trying to do too many things. It's actually much, much simpler than using a bunch of semi-compatible tools which all attempt to do similar things in ad-hoc ways. Nix is just a dependency management system where dependencies are specified by their content hash. Your machine contains a content-addressable store of objects which can be precisely referenced by any other object. It takes the guesswork out of dependency management. Other dependency managers effectively run a search engine to try and find an appropriate dependency from some search terms.