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by m45t3r 1709 days ago
> What we dislike is everything talking about the costs, and not the benefits.

Exactly. I tried to push really hard our company to use Nix/NixOS (and maybe in our case nix-darwin too, since the majority of engineering uses macOS), but it never went anywhere (I did convert a few of my colleagues to use NixOS though).

But why? Well, onboarding is a pain in my company. We have some Ansible scripts that always break in some innovative ways, so it takes a whole day to setup a new machine for a bunch of engineers. Sure, partly of the fault is the fact that our Ansible scripts are really hacky (in some steps they still call some Bash scripts instead of using Ansible DSL for example), but Ansible is simply lacking in some places to have a really pleasant experience.

If we could use NixOS though, this would be a very different matter. I use NixOS in the same company, had the same configuration for pretty much 1 year, and also survived a broken laptop and setup my whole setup in like 30 minutes (most of time spend downloading packages actually). I even separated part of my NixOS configuration in another repository so other engineers using NixOS can also make use of it.

Yeah, it took a long time to get where I am currently, but nowadays I just stopped worrying about managing system, system update breakages, and anything like this. I can just use my system, fully up-to-date, and I know if something breaks, I can revert. It is beautiful.

1 comments

Yeah I ended up working at a place that was already using NixOS -- as in developer laptops come with NixOS, and that was definitely a huge plus. Much nicer when the war is already won, and there is no class of macOS or Windows-using devs to appease!