[pxc]

I feel like Nix is worth it for me at this point, but I've definitely been through some of the pain described. This is a tough critique to hear for anyone who loves the project but I agree with the core of it (except the syntax issue).

Worth reading for Nix people and prospective Nix users alike, imo.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I don't want to rain on a parade; I think about it as opportunity for people who care about the project to rally around. I know plenty of people care about the user experience, but the current efforts seem kind of superficial and limited. It kind of feels like efforts are geared toward making Nix slightly better for its current user-base: individual, super-technical users who are really excited about package management and functional purity. Sadly, this misses out on Nix as a package manager for larger organizations (packaging their own software as well as configuring their hosts) as well as individual users who want the benefits of declarative systems but who don't want to learn a ton about package management, functional programming, Nix minutia, etc.

IMHO, it seems like there should be a UX working group that starts with broad scenarios and personas and develops a vision of what tooling should look like and works from there, rather than haphazard, incremental improvements on the current state of Nix tooling/workflows/etc. It could be interesting to look at how the Rust project makes big ambitious changes (they seem to do a really good job from my vantage point). Again, this is my view from afar as someone who has never run a big open source project and knows relatively little about package management (though thanks to Nix, much more than I ever wanted to know!).