[mschwaig]

If you are interested in Nix but don't know too much about it, let me tell you one thing:

You can use the package manager to package, build and install software and to take advantage of their large package repo and features like nix-shell without using the OS. What the OS gives you is a full system and all of its services managed exclusively with the paradigms of the package manager.

I do run NixOS on all four of my machines and I got in OS-first package manager second. At first, like the author, I also frequently needed escape hatches like other machines or VMs, but I think if you get into the package manager first you're probably less likely to get stuck. Depending on what you want to do you get a lot of the good stuff with much less commitment that way.

[dsissitka]

You can but unless you use NixOS the experience might not be great.

A few months ago I tried migrating my development environment from Ansible to Nix. My playbooks are basically in alphabetical order and so that meant starting with Alacritty. I immediately hit two issues:

- A conflict between the version of fontconfig the package was compiled with and the version of fontconfig installed on my system.

- Nix's OpenGL problem. [0]

They're easy enough to work around but I wonder how big the list would've gotten if I hadn't stopped there.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9415

[throwaway894345]

Using Nix to write packages sucks, but I think the parent is talking about using it as a package manager (I.e., to install packages that others have written), which is usually a pretty good experience.

[microtonal]

Using Nix to write packages sucks

Could you explain a bit more what you mean? I had prior experience making Debian packages (on Debian and Ubuntu), Arch packages, and a bit of Homebrew on macOS. When I started writing Nix derivations two years ago, I found that it much easier than making Debian packages. Arch packages were easier than both, because the build scripts are just shell scripts, but I found it easier to make correct packages with Nix.

[throwaway894345]

If I have an app and I want to build it with Nix, it’s typically a lot more work than using my language’s native packaging tooling even if Nix just calls that tooling under the hood. Nix gives me things that my language’s package tooling doesn’t (such as treating my application as part of a larger heterogeneous assembly), but very often that tradeoff isn’t worthwhile (and much to my chagrin because it would be very nice to use a single build tool to manage everything in my project).

[microtonal]

Thanks for clarifying. I thought that you were referring to traditional package managers, not language package managers (such as cargo or npm).

I have most experience with Rust/cargo and packaging Rust applications is really easy with buildRustPackage. As a bonus, you can also easily pull in necessary native libraries.

On the other hand, things like Python packages are pretty tricky.

One of the problems is that the Python ecosystem does not have a strong tradition of semantic versioning. For that reason, a lot of Python packages have (perhaps overly) strict bounds. That works fine for something like pip, which can pick any version of a Python package and can typically find a way to resolve all dependencies. But it's harder with Nix, because nixpkgs only ships one version of Python packages (for good reasons).

Another issue with Python packages that I encountered several times is that some Python packages directly modify their own paths (e.g. until recently Huggingface datasets), which breaks with the read-only Nix store.

[mschwaig]

For using Python packages that are avialable via pip I have been quite happy with [mach-nix](https://github.com/DavHau/mach-nix), which can pull prebuilt python wheels(?) from pip directly. You can also configure it to obtain those packages in other ways, like from source via pip or from nixpkgs. You can also feed it Python packages you have in source code form locally.

[mschwaig]

I can imagine sitting down and migrating a lot of complex packages to Nix is probably quite a tall order right now. Partially because I think a switch like that is always painful, but also because of the open issues, bugs, yet unanswered questions and usability issues that do exist.

I think it depends on if your use case allows for a gradual transition and on your tolerance for migration pain wether or not Nix is worth the trouble right now.

Even if packaging is more difficult with Nix, I appreciate that packages do end up containing a much more precise and flexible description of what they depend on.

[throwaway894345]

Even many toy applications is painful for one reason or another. For example, even a Python toy app is likely to use a C-extension dependency that hasn’t been packaged in Nix yet, and since C’s ecosystem is a trash fire, you’ll have to figure out how to package it and it’s transitive dependencies in Nix. You have different problems in Go, where you need to provide the hash for the vendor derivation, but the only documented way to get that hash is to run a tool that only works on Linux (and I’m on MacOS). And in whatever case, the documentation for the Nix ecosystem is sorely lacking, so odds are you will have to reverse l-engineer other similar package definitions in nixpkgs to figure out how to make your own package.

Note that these issues aren’t insurmountable, but it doesn’t seem like the Nix community cares very much about them (and of course it’s open source software so there is no obligation for them to care, etc but that doesn’t magically make it a good tool for these use cases either).

[dsissitka]

I was too. :) Those issues occurred when using Nix on Ubuntu 20.04.

[throwaway894345]

Ah, my bad. Should’ve finished my coffee before commenting...

[mschwaig]

Were you trying to use Nix for running your graphical terminal on a non-NixOS system?

I have personally worked with Nix on a Fedora system, but only for things that run inside the terminal.

EDIT: I removed some content here because it didn't think it applied since you clarified in another comment you were trying to use existing packages.

[ris]

This. I think the most powerful ability of Nix is in defining development and deployment environments and the managing of headless machines. Though I do realize that a lot of people love running NixOS as a desktop distribution, I do wish people wouldn't get so hung up on this being the way to "dive into" Nix - it's quite a "deep end" experience and I think it puts a lot of people off.

I would generally advise people to start getting into Nix by using it to define your development environments on your existing (linux or macos) daily OS.