| In the more philosophical sense I think you're right. I've been using NixOS for 2 years now on all my machines* but I still don't know the language. I use it as a stable base system, but when I need to do something that I'm unable to do with Nix I still drop into a $DISTRO container and do my work there where everything is stateful and "disgusting". Having worked with DevOps for awhile I can happily tell you that we don't run around building Docker containers all days, at least in my team the developers do so. We provide them with a base to build upon, provide CI and stateful services like databases and storage. I spend an awful lot of time writing Terraform and Helm charts though, since things needs to run somewhere. But yes, the immutable nature of Nix is great. Nix was VERY helpful for me when I switched GPU's from NVIDIA to AMD on my desktop, no screen? Reboot, reconfigure, retry. But yes, I agree. Something that resembles Nix will take over the computing world, as someone said somewhere in the comments of this post. The great thing about Nix is that when you fix something it stays fixed. Even if it was a PITA to get there. |
I used the exact same words “things stay fixed” elsewhere in the thread. Which is big psychologically. I’ll do some really difficult or even painful things in good humor if I get a lasting benefit. But if someone or something is just going to yank the rug underneath me next month? Fuck it, hack up some doofy shell script and call it a day.
Nix aligns the incentives on getting things right. I’m happy to learn the arcana of some weird corner case of some tool or service if I can apply that in a way that is permanent.
Now we just need someone to unfuck the UX nightmare :P