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by samvher 2211 days ago
I tried to fully switch my work environment to NixOS 2 or 3 years ago. I really like the concept and I think it's a very good approach to reproducible build environments, in theory it's much cleaner than the massive data replication you get with e.g. Docker.

I only lasted for a month or two though, for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I had a lot of trouble with Python packages - Nix suggests a certain approach for dealing with them which didn't work very well for me and I didn't manage to set up an alternative that I liked. (For Haskell I loved working with Nix though!) A lot of software I use also wasn't available in the repositories and I tried to build some packages but found the Nix language a bit obtuse. The basic syntax and logic are not too hard but I still found many of the packages I used as examples very confusing.

In the end I'm back to Ubuntu using Docker whenever I need reproducible environments.