[zapita]

I didn't encounter any assholes (or rather I didn't encounter any more than usual... I have yet to find a completely asshole-free open-source project).

Maybe "derision" was the wrong term. Nobody was rude or disrespectful. Just oddly patronizing. They just didn't feel there was anything wrong with the user experience, or any need to improve Nix to better meet the needs of non-experts. The main sentiment I observed was that Nix was pretty close to perfect, but also misunderstood - and that it was mostly up to the rest of the world to better understand it. That struck me as the wrong way to go about making your project successful.

[jcrben]

I've experienced the opposite.

The fact that this release highlights a new 'nix' command and deprecates a bunch of ugly and verbose baggage shows the commitment to UX.

[zapita]

That's encouraging to hear. I will give it another go soon.

The area that IMO needs the most work is the packaging experience, including the DSL itself... and the "I just want to build this source without having to become a black belt functional packager first" experience.

[pxc]

My biggest gripe with Nix packaging is that the tooling varies so widely per ecosystem. Aside from that, though, I generally find packaging for Nixpkgs to be much, much easier than packaging for most distros.

What kind of packaging experience are you used to?

[pxc]

Most of what we can do with Nix is both a consequence of its model and constrained by it. Part of what this means is that things users want may not have direct replacements in the Nix world, even when they do have _alternatives_.

When we have a close but significantly different analogue of something a (potential) user seems to be asking for, I think that's when you tend to see this type of response the most. ‘Once you understand the model, you'll see that this slightly different thing will probably work better.’

I think:

1. Sometimes it's really true-- understanding the model can inspire you to take a different path, make a different choice than you naively might, and ultimately be happy with it.

2. There's a selection bias working against the community here: as long as the Nix UI is clunky, the people we'll find in the community will be those who are drawn in by its design principles and can overlook the UX warts. The improvements that come with the Nix 2.0 release make me hopeful that we can attract more contributors for whom such things are very important, and who will be inclined to further refine the UX as they work with Nix.

I think most Nixers have known that the UX is horrible in some respects for a long time, and also that improvements in that regard were in the pipeline for Nix 2.0 (which was to be called '1.12' until recently). Heavy Nix users have largely been focused on our own use cases, because we only have so much time and energy. I hope that as our userbase grows and UX improves, the composition of our community can change so that users can feel better heard and represented when they raise concerns like you have here.