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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

The real break for me using NixOS as a regular driver was that I just could not figure out how to get Ruby on Rails to play nice with it. NixOS breaks a lot of assumptions that programs make about $PATH, and even if it's done for good reasons it plays holy hell with the development stack of some languages. I eventually gave up and moved my dev setup back to OSX (and then that PC died anyways). Maybe they've fixed it since then, I haven't tried.

I do continue to use it for my homelab infrastructure though. It is extremely good at handling new versions of configuration of Prometheus, and I would never consider anything else at this point. Just not what I'd use as a dev environment.

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I moved to Docker for ruby/rails dev long ago and never looked back. Trying to do it locally, especially if there are others involved, is a path to pain and frustration as "works on my machine" creeps into a `bundle install` every few months.

After having spent weeks learning nix, I'm convinced that docker is simply a better tool for most use-cases of nix.

Coming from docker before nix, I think nix is a better version of docker for some use-cases. If the ecosystem is supported then I much prefer nix for speed (both runtime and development speed)

I agree that when nix works, it's great.

However, I find debugging docker infinitely easier than debugging nix. I played around with the idea of adding nix for work projects and getting buy-in from other colleagues. But after working with it for weeks and still running into issues, there's no way I could in good conscience recommend the tool.

Yep, definitely have to be careful about exposing nix to others. I did it on a 2 man team to great effect, but would really have to vet teammates before doing it on a broader scale. I do, however, generally write all of my scripts with nix-shell shebangs to give a layer of consistency/guarantee, and that has had a couple people ask me about it.

What problem did you have? I had an issue getting an RoR project running on NixOS, but it was just a lack of understanding. I needed Ruby 2.7.4 for the project, which is not available in current nixpkgs. Instead, I just imported the nixpkgs tarball with 2.7.4 and I was good to go. I found it by searching ruby_2_7_4 on hydra.nixos.org

It's worth noting that one can handle really badly behaving software using buildFHSUserEnv.

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