| > Nix got to a part of its lifetime where marketing and onboarding have to be heavily prioritized and its community doesn't seem very keen on it. As far as I can tell, Nix is growing pretty well. The results from the last community survey indicated that most of the users started using it within the last few years. > And I really want to make it super clear if you're still with me: I want Nix to succeed. For now though I view it as a nascent tool that still has long ways to go. Perhaps by analogy: if apt-get is like notepad, and nix is like emacs/vim, it'd be neat for something like VSCode. I think rough edges like "nix isn't nice to use for <some common programming language>", etc. would be good to sort out. -- But, yeah, that the documentation is rough, and the onboarding is harsh, were some of the big pain points identified in the community survey. > Telling any of them "it's not made for you" is not doing their cause any favors. Not every tool is well suited to all users. I wouldn't recommend Arch or Gentoo linux distributions to someone who doesn't want to spend time tinkering, or spending time figuring out why something broke. I'd recommend Debian instead. I wouldn't recommend Rust to a team which can't afford the time to train developers. Whereas, Go is a much simpler language that's easier to pick up. In its current state, Nix isn't well suited to "I just want things to work, I'm not interested in a package manager more involved than apt-get". |
Taking a single sample from recently is just coming across as fanboying and wishing for your desired conclusion to be true. Let's not go in that territory, it's not arguing in good faith.
One of my favorite technologies was "trending" for a bit but then plateau-ed. These things happen. Factors vary but usually fall within a narrow set that's well-known by the "realist" type of people. Many don't like hearing that however, hence endless bikeshedding ensues. No need for that here.
> Perhaps by analogy: if apt-get is like notepad, and nix is like emacs/vim, it'd be neat for something like VSCode.
And that's exactly what my point is. Nix is nothing like VScode for package management. It's more like an ancient version of VIM whose advocates swear that the months and years needed to learn it well will pay off to eternity. Sorry, I don't mean to bash you or anybody else but I've read forums and GitHub issues. Nix's community demeanor leaves things to be desired.
> Not every tool is well suited to all users.
If you want to "solve" package management, reproducibility et. al. then you should try to cater to all users.
I'll remind you that I really want for Nix to succeed. I hate it how one update command can change files in /etc, /var, /usr and /home. I want isolation! I want trackability! I want to issue a system-wide update command and then check logs for each package updated and which files did it touch exactly. I want that put in a time-travelling database (a la ZFS snapshots) and be able to revert whenever I wish.
These things are hugely important and extremely critical for the future.
In this context just throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's not for everyone" is just not being ambitious enough. I and many others want a replacement for e.g. pacman and apt-get. A complete, 100% replacement, that does everything better.
So far Nix is not that. Until it started closing in on that target then it will remain niche technology for fans.
Obviously so far my vision is not aligning with that of the maintainers. I get that. But I also have plenty of experience and am well within my right to use it to try and predict what traction will their tool get if they do (or don't) certain things.