Hacker News Reader

Comment by EasyMark | Hacker News Reader

I understand your point of view, but I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for over a decade and the only time it has broken on updates was hardware failure. I tried nix, but there is just too much to learn just to install an OS. If I needed 99.9% reproducibility I would go with it I guess but what I’m doing works for me and I don’t have to learn a whole new DSL just to install an OS

View on HN

I agree. If all you need is Linux on a bog standard machine and would rather spend your time doing something else than tinkering on your OS, nix is not for you. Life is short and there are lots of things to do - we all have different priorities.

Idk, in terms of installation difficulty NixOS is about the same as any other distro I've installed. The process is roughly: boot the LiveCD, verify disk config, run nixos-generate-config, add some basic packages to configuration.nix, run nixos-rebuild switch, and restart. The first time I did it, I didn't even understand the most basic aspects of the language.

> add some basic packages to configuration.nix

This includes understanding how nix configuration works, finding the packages you want, understanding how their configuration is mapped in to nix idiosyncratic way of configuring software which is not well documented, will most likely require you read the package and map yourself between the software doc and what nix changes, then properly structuring the config before applying it.

This is not in any way simple.

I pressed C-c accidentally during the upgrade(wrong terminal) and it broke the entire system(had to manually change a few files rebuild initramfs to be able to boot). I would take the complexity of Nix without a thought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com