Comment by chem83 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chem83 | Hacker News Reader

NixOS has been my daily driver since 2022/2023 and I have greatly improved the management of my 2 computers and few VMs since. Because of LLMs, I now understand the language much better, but even if I didn't want to write Nix directly, describing the config to AI usually produces good results.

The two main sticking points IMO are still:

- Development environments are still a pain. devenv.sh is great for web and backend, but not perfect for dependency (package) management and more complicated environments like mobile or embedded

- nixpkgs monorepo doesn't update fast enough IMO. As a consequence, I see a number of flake repositories popping up to more easily package and distribute software not yet on nixpkgs or that don't update often enough (https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix is a good example). This is perhaps by design, but it takes some digging to find the reliable and trustworthy flake repos. I'm increasingly concerned with AUR-like trust issues

> Development environments are still a pain. devenv.sh is great for web and backend

Weird, development environments are one of my favorite things about nix. I don't use anything like devenv.sh, just add a `flake.nix` to the repo defining a devShell, and then add `use flake` to `.envrc` and let direnv activate it. Every major and most minor editors have support for direnv, and if they don't, you can just launch them from a shell in that directory. This makes the only system dependencies for a great dev environment nix and direnv.

> I'm increasingly concerned with AUR-like trust issues

Once you've done it a few times, most things are pretty easy to package yourself, and you can just check those derivations into your git repo for your machines and use them. Especially if you're using LLMs, it shouldn't be all that hard to package what you need in most cases. For stuff that's more complicated or difficult, it's more likely there will be some kind of de facto standard flake for it.

Is devens something else than nix shell?

devenv is essentially a convenience wrapper around nix shell with some nice tooling

devenv is really nice.

devenv brings modularity to development shells.

For example, you could configure your devenv module for the shell you want (which env vars you want set, which packages you want available, etc.), and then re-use this module in other shells.

As such, one of the nice things devenv provides is modules with the compilers/lsp/etc. for different languages, so getting a rust environment is about as simple as `languages.rust.enable = true;`.

I haven't explored using the services/processes aspect of it, but it's got support for things like that to. -- I saw it put somewhere: "oh, like docker-compose, but you can compose the configuration".

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