Nix has the same problem as Terraform: it solves a lot of problems, but you have to 'live and breathe' their DSL.
You're no longer learning/maintaining Linux - you're learning and maintaining Nix.
You're no longer learning/maintaining Linux - you're learning and maintaining Nix.
I find it much more pleasant to live and breathe the NixOS configuration than to live and breathe someone else's OS. It's a bit like a woodworkers workshop. Do you prefer to have someone else configure the workshop or do rather tune it to your use-cases over time?
> You're no longer learning/maintaining Linux - you're learning and maintaining Nix.
I disagree. I learned more Linux fundamentals with NixOS (and via that the Arch documentation) than I learned from running Ubuntu.
I grew up with Linux and whilst it's changed, it's far more of my OS than what is provided by Nix. The idea is sound, to provide a more standard configuration, but that's what many Linux standards have done, and then been forked because people don't all think the same way - and they shouldn't.
Sure, if you're running servers or otherwise need reproducible systems in production, there's absolutely a lot of value in Nix. For a personal computer, which is something I still value greatly, I don't want to be constrained so much, especially by a DSL that is not intuitive to me.
I know Nix isn't 'new' and has just become more popular of late due to influencers, and I see the benefits for those that don't mind the aspects I mentioned, but it's absolutely not for me, or a lot of others I suspect.
I will stick with Debian for stable, Arch for rolling, and see what occasional others (void, for example) have to offer at the time. I used to be a big fan of gentoo, and I still would prefer to build from source, but it doesn't offer anything beyond that - I would love a variant of gentoo that also isolated dependencies for each package.
Then again, I suspect as flatpak continues to do well (or Canonical impose snaps everywhere) there will be even less space on the desktop for such 'personality' anyway.
Non-American here:
- Digital Subscriber Line? Damn Small Linux?
It's the problem with every abstraction it can be 90% good but for edge cases you need to know what is happening behind the scene.
But for some use cases is better to know the state of the system instead of running by hands a sequence of commands.
I have no problem with the ability to know the state of the system - that's one of the 'cool' features. I just don't like it being locked away from me (on my personal computer) and having to use a language (DSL) that I dislike to describe everything when I already am happy with what exists.
(Disclaimer: Still stuck on NixOS, am myself "meh" about the language and have only dabbled in Guix, still need to commit a machine to it)
That said, I still find nix difficult to understand and learn, and when I get stuck on something it seems extremely frustrating to unstick myself.
I would love to try Guix, mostly because I think building on an existing language would have solved many of my issues with nix, but the whole point for me is that I want a stable config across all of my platforms; the “non free” restrictions guix poses has gated me from it.
Made it seem like troubleshooting was going to be way more difficult than it was worth.