[exdsq]

Nope nope nope. They're not fine. Nix is really really hard to use. I worked for a company that ran all the ops with Nix managed by some of the contributors. Every time I wanted to do something I'd have to get DevOps to do it for me. I've never ever had that level of difficulty doing stuff outside of a Nix environment and I really, really tried. Most of my colleagues who are fairly decent developers struggled with it too. It's the only tech I advise against when it's mentioned nowadays. And I want to like it.

[lambdaba]

On the other hand only Nix (to my knowledge) guarantees truly reproducible builds.

It helps that people who are into Nix most often use NixOS. NixOS is the only distro I've written packages for. It's not even particularly hard since there's a lot of inspiration to find in the official and community repos + people sharing personal configurations.

The UX wasn't the best but it's improving.

It remains extremely reliable which is not something that you could say of other systems.

[exdsq]

I went all in and used NixOS too, but things like managing CI with Hydra, running perf tests on Nix ops clusters, debugging 10K+ Nix repos… you start to get it down and then things change like with flakes… and all the tools like Nix2Stack, Nix2Cabal, Nix2Docker, managing secrets, user profiles, none of it is existing knowledge you can bring or really take elsewhere. If you’re familiar with the ‘innovation token’ idea Nix would take all of them in my eyes for a project.

Docker is more pragmatic unless you spend hundreds of hours on Nix, in my opinion.