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Comment by jahsome | Hacker News Reader

The line about nix making it easier for newcomers in the readme and similar statements always trigger me. I am quite a competent person and I've never once thought "that was easy" when trying to use nix.

I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating seemingly endless already-deprecated methodologies to reach that point. Perhaps I'm just dumb, or looking in the wrong places.

In any case in my experience the end result is every time I see something related to nix, I find myself thinking "I can't wait til that's easy"

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"Flox began its life during the deployment of Nix at the D. E. Shaw group, where it quickly proved invaluable by making Nix easier for newcomers".

Is that the line you are referring to? Sounds like the opposite of what you suggests it says.

The line suggests the opposite yes. That's why I take issue with it.

There's nothing easy about nix. Maybe flox makes it easier, but I am so burned out by screwing around for countless hours with nix I'm not even going to try to figure out if it's true.

I'm confused here. That quote clearly says that Flox makes Nix easier for newcomers, not that Nix is easy. What exactly do you take issue with?

The fact that my experience with nix has historically been _so_ difficult, I fear even something that claims to make it "easier" will not be able to deliver -- my aversion has everything to do with nix, and little do with any product which claims to improve it. Consider it guilt by association.

For me, it doesn't simply need to be easier, it needs to be usable. I lack confidence a product which is an abstraction layer is going to solve that for me, because I have a personal inability to understand the underlying system.

Maybe you need to try it out rather than casting doubts about a product you haven't tried yet? Pre-emptively doubting claims based on your past experience with a tool Flox claims to solve seems like a poor way to go here.

For what it's worth, there are a number of options in the Nix space that really do solve for its complexity like Devbox and now Flox.

Maybe I know that but I'm still too damaged to try? That is the entire point of my post.

Thanks for the "advice" though.

If you still use it, my best suggestion is to use a github search for 'path:.nix TERMs' when you run in to issues. It's likely someone already has that custom package, or an overlay to fix that missing compile option, or whatever else it is that you're looking for. I find reading other peoples solutions also helps with understanding and solving related problems.

I'm in no means claiming Nix is perfect, but coming from other distros to NixOS I really appreciate the ability to reboot to a new generation and then reboot back if I run in to issues. To do the same in Arch I had a bunch of 'snapper plus manual steps' to accomplish the same.

I read that as Flox makes nix easier for newcomers, not that nix is easy for newcomers.

Exact same experience here. Been fiddling with nixos for quite a while, but never got comfortable with .nix or flakes. The base concepts keep escaping my mind, I have to revisit every time I have to configure something new and I just got tired. Issues are difficult to debug and you have to go through very specific commands and a hellish filesystem to understand what's going wrong. I love the concept, but I feel like it just gets too much in my way.

> and a hellish filesystem

What do you mean by this part? The actual filesystem like Ext4/ZFS/etc? Or the removal of the unix Filesystem Heirarchy and replacement with a simulated/softlinked version in Nix/OS?

I love nix and have contributed quite a few packages to the nix repository, and I will vouch that it’s anything but easy. I have a background in Haskell which makes it more familiar, but even the syntax is counterintuitive to newcomers.

This is my experience too. At scale, I find Nix to be really slow, and the remote building infrastructure over VPN to be very flakey (see what I did there?). But it does solve some tough problems, and also introduces some new ones. Nix is incredibly useful, and extremely frustrating at the same time. Also, disk space...

Hard agree. I see the advantages but the initial learning curve is incredibly steep. Funny how this mimics my experience with Rust.

Agreed on the experience, hard to onboard. I looked at devenv.sh as easier way to get going. Implemented all with Nix, less lock-in. Just found std [0] and that looks quite promising too.

[0] https://std.divnix.com/

I think once somebody solves the hellish configuration with another language that people can actually understand NixOs will take off. I mean, I hate js as much as everybody else, but I’d rather use that to configure nix than whatever that thing is that they use now.

There is garn a typescript frontend to the nix language. https://github.com/garnix-io/garn/

The language isn't the problem, it's the structure (if you can call it that) of Nixpkgs that makes it so difficult. And no, flakes are not the answer, they may solve composability but they create other problems.

I used the repl from day 1 and it was so intuitive. No other alternative has a repl (besides guix I guess)

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