Hacker News Reader

Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Sad to see the Nix team can't get UX right.

Their technology is on point.

There's a massive push to improve UX but it'll take time for things to happen and it's only really just in the last few years that nix has gained the popularity in industry for there to be more than just a few groups spending engineering hours towards improving things.

I think this is the right path. Get the guts working right and stable, then make the useful thing usable. That last bit is by far the hardest, but trying to make something usable useful is impossible.

It's been said many times and many ways, but the big thing will be the push to flakes. If they can bump that to stable before the project and it's integrations lose momentum, Nix might just become the defacto build system for Unix software.

The development experience of flakes is just unreal. Having seen it in-use at work was eye opening:

- You get all the Nix goodness, including package/dependency caching for multiple OS/arches with minimal configuration. Build times are practically reduced to automated searching and downloading.

- Dev environments are much cleaner and not spread across READMEs and makefiles. Adding a build dependency is one (1) SLOC in flake.nix. Adding environment variables is trivial, and it all gets shared with your branch.

- Invoking a quick 'nix develop' drops you into a shell w/ build dependencies, `nix build` builds the program, `nix profile install` adds it to your current environment, etc.

The list goes on. It will clean up shop once dev teams find out how little configuration is required to get this all working, if Nix move fast enough to ship this.

I think you’re likely right, but as has also been said many time and many ways, the documentation is truly terrible. I don’t know why there isn’t a good documentation set that takes you from nix to nixos to flakes. When do I choose nix shell? Flakes? nix-env? I’ve got a few months between gigs and I’ve been flirty with nix for a year or so so I plan to dig in and master it, but it is mind bogglingly hard to get started.

Ironically, the Nix team is the one providing the best UX to me. It's more that many community solutions are stale and broken, despite being well-made and thoughtfully designed. I'd like to make home-manager work for me, but I struggle to in practice.

Well, for most other distro you also Google around and back someone together all the time, we just got used to it.

I want to try nix, but honestly can't justify the time investment when pop_os just works for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com