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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Le sigh, another day, another group of people turned off on NixOS for completely legitimate learning curve, documentation, and support reasons that are nonetheless heartbreakingly fixable. It’s never the user’s fault.

Home manager is a well-intentioned and technically well-executed piece of software that is nonetheless a disaster as the “how to do dots on Nix” story, especially for newcomers. We need “Home Manager Light” or something.

I’m a fucking serious Nix-head and I procrastinate doing anything serious to my dots like getting a root canal.

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On the contrary for me, playing around with nix and nixos is how I procrastinate everything. It's incredibly effective.

My favorite was going through the Nix reference manual. Section 4.2, Profiles

> If the profile doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically.

Nope! If it doesn't exist then running the commands this tells you to will bork your installation completely, and unrecoverably with the knowledge you have gained up until that point in the book, at least without starting from scratch again.

Search for issue - closed in 2018, wontfix as "It's documented correctly and quite clearly." by someone who apparently didn't read or understand that the literal reference manual tells people to break their installation.

I have never touched Nix/NixOS since, because clearly they don't want or need people without 100% of their lives to dedicate themselves to it.

I find nix incredible but the thing that I struggle with is trying to figure out how to do things on nixpkgs, and home manager in particular while not using nixos.

This is a critical use case for the apprehensive crowd like me who is averse to distro hopping, let alone willing to take on the paradigm shift of Linux-to-nixos.

The documentation for either is all but non-existent and the pages I can find are glorified source or man pages. Given how scalable nix, in the right use case, can make things, that's just not the modern experience it should or could be.

Nixpkgs is also critical for non-apprehensive people who nonetheless need to use MacOS and other distros on a daily basis.

Great point. My $dayjob use case is the same, but probably worse (windows + wsl).

I completely agree. I'm also trying to wrap my head around Nix on a non-NixOS system. My requirements are to just manage my dotfiles (successful with home-manager) and configuring my system/installing certain packages, so everyone on the host can e. g. start a docker container with Docker installed by Nix. Ideally all with flakes.

I suppose, I can't have the second part without NixOS, though ...

I like YADM for managing my dot files and expect that even if I switched to NixOS, I would keep using it because it works well and I have no complaints about it.

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