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Comment by blablabla123 | Hacker News Reader

I also tried Nix (as well as NixOS) but it's obviously difficult to use and has a very steep learning curve. But actually it might be the most flexible and stable package manager out there. So probably the problems mentioned can be fixed by custom configuration but that might require deep-diving into Nix and using Functional Programming for package configs... For some time I also used to just ./configure && make && make install (sometimes combined with stow) to my home dir, that worked also well but makes installing and upgrading tedious.

That said, I'm sticking to Homebrew. Not really sure about this auto-upgrading, maybe it can be deactivated, on the other hand probably it's a good way to keep packages updated.

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I think the problem with Nix is that it is actually not a package manager but a build tool (that provides some package management utilities). People try Nix with the assumption that it should be as easy as apt-get (for example), but found tutorials with a block of code in a weird language...

Sure, you will eventually need to use the Nix language if you want to have complex and reusable configurations, but this is actually not needed for beginners! To install packages, you need the Nix package manager (with channels already setup) and use `nix-env` to install for the current user. You can just search for the package in https://search.nixos.org/packages and use the command directly.

If you want to have user configurations, use home-manager, just modify the example to add other options, you seldom need complicated Nix expressions unless you need to build a package by yourself.

When you really need to do so, you may want to have a look at other's build script, and make sure you understand everything in the build process, including compile dependencies and runtime dependencies, environment variables, etc. You may want to read Nix Pills at some point, but maybe you can get away with reading just the relevant section (incomplete knowledge, but usually enough to get the work done).

> I think the problem with Nix is that it is actually not a package manager but a build tool (that provides some package management utilities). People try Nix with the assumption that it should be as easy as apt-get (for example), but found tutorials with a block of code in a weird language...

Indeed, I've been using Nix for many years (on Ubuntu, NixOS and macOS), and I now find the apt-get style 'considered harmful'.

Instead, I define a single Nix derivation ("package") which provides everything I want in its 'bin/' directory, e.g.

    with nixpkgs;
    buildEnv {
      name = "my-macbook-programs";
      paths = [ bash gimp /* etc */ ];
    }

The nix-build command creates a symlink called `result`, so I put `/path/to/my/git/repo/result/bin` in my $PATH.

Just wondering, what is the benefit of doing this over nix-env for system-wide applications?

For project specific environments, I usually use `shell.nix` (maybe I should switch to flakes now) together with direnv that runs nix-shell automatically when you enter the directory.

For beginners to Nix, I think they should do the transition gradually, there are so many concepts in Nix that may be unfamiliar to them. I think getting a system to work quickly (maybe in a not so idiomatic way) is more encouraging than asking them to read Nix Pills and understand how packaging works in Nix :)

`nix-env` is an imperative command, whilst writing a .nix file is declarative. In particular, the latter can be managed using git, e.g. here's mine: https://github.com/chriswarbo/dotfiles/blob/41c5c4643845f437...

That's actually over-complicated, since I used to use nix-darwin and haven't bothered to un-pick it yet.

You could use nix-env to install the file with `nix-env --install --file default.nix` rather than using nix-build + symlinking the result.

What are the advantages of just nix-build, and adding the result/bin/ to path? Arguably, `nix-env --install` modifies the underlying profiles which manage symlinks. (nix-build + add to PATH is imperative invocation; but `nix-env --install` is and imperative invocation with a stateful effect).

e.g. of "how could that be bad?". I'd managed to get myself into a confusing state with `nix-env --install`. When setting up NixOS, I'd installed firefox as the root user. Months later, in my normal user account, I was confused why such an old firefox was installed (since my profile didn't install firefox). I can't remember exactly, but this also somehow caused problems with fontconfig. -- Probably easily avoidable; but if you don't know what you were doing, you might also try all sorts of install commands and forget.

`which -a` and `realpath` are your best friend when you're dealing with a multiuser package manager! Together, they make it easy to figure out if a package comes from your user profile, the default imperative profile, the system profile, or a transient shell profile

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