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Comment by bsnnkv | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of love for Homebrew from many years of using it, but I don't think you'll ever find me using it in macOS or Linux again. I use Nix on both now and I'm convinced that it is the saner way of doing things.

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Does Nix still have that extremely steep and high learning curve and huge time invest before you actually grok it? I'd love a Nix that is about as hard to use as homebrew, but no luck so far.

This might be helpful:

-- https://zero-to-nix.com/

Someone also did a video walkthrough of this material recently. I don't have the link, but it might be worth searching for.

To be fair you only really need to know the commands to invoke which are similar to brew as far as what they do, and not the underlying nix expression language which is where things get difficult. Unless you intend to go full power user and add your own overrides, in which case might not be worth it.

Imo, no. I think the documentation is very good, unlike what I had heard. The thing that I really had to invest in was my ability to patiently read documentation closely instead of aimlessly trying to find a shortcut by jumping around the doc pages.

Haha - I really began to learn nix when I started to read the docs before bed like a novel. I’ve started to do this for more libs / frameworks and it’s going quite well - It seems to be the fast track to power user status!

Almost certainly; I still have CC on a ticket from a few years ago that one of the literal steps in the reference manual (teaching --switch-profile) was extremely misleading, didn't work, and actively broke your ability to continue working on nix.

The ticket was closed because the man-page has a technical description of what the command actually does, and people should just know how the command is supposed to work, even if the reference manual tells them otherwise.

Beginner-hostility appears to be baked into the ecosystem.

Check out https://devenv.sh It's a fairly fresh project, but it makes per-project nixpkgs usage much simpler than going all the way in.

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