[tomberek]

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values.

For example; people seem to have accepted that the benefits of using terraform in spite of various difficulties - the learning of its language or needing to hire specialists. The mantra of "infrastructure as code" is enough to drive adoption. What is our mantra? We need to accept that "reproducibility" isn't quite working and that we need either a clearer message, or to explain the message.

[grumbel]

> but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt.

Build source straight from Git:

   nix run github:someuser/someproject

Need a different version?

   nix run github:someuser/someproject?ref=v1.0.0

Wanna replace some dependency?

   nix run \
      --override-input somelib github:someotheruser/somelib \
      github:someuser/someproject

Wanna fork:

   git clone https://github.com/someuser/someproject
   # do your changes
   nix run someproject/

And the best part is, it's conceptually very simple, it's mostly just a bunch of symlinks and environment variables behind the scenes. If you wanna inspect what's in a package, just `cd /nix/store/yourpackage-HASH` and look around.

NixOS just feels like a distribution build from the ground up for Free Software. The "reproducibility" in every day use just means that stuff won't randomly break for no reason. And if you don't wanna go the full NixOS route, you can just install the Nix package manager itself on any other distribution.

That said, the part where Nix gets painful is when it has to interact with the rest of the software world. Things like software that wants to auto-update itself really does not fit into the Nix ecosystem at all and can be rather annoying to get to work.

There are of course numerous other pain points, missing features and all that. But being able to flip between versions, fork, compile and all that with feels just so much better than anything else.

[carapace]

I disagree, I think the value proposition for reproducibility is clear, it's just that the learning curve "is too damn high!" I'm highly motivated to learn and use Nix (or Guix for that matter) but I've bounced off of it three or four times now, and I'm the kind of weirdo who learns new PLs for fun.

Someone once said that you don't learn Nix, you reverse engineer it.

[takeda]

I think the reason why Nix is hard isn't the language (although lazily evaluated functional language is definitively a part of it), but the paradigm shift, but this is necessary for reproducibility.

Imagine if you had a distro where you couldn't depend on existing state (so you couldn't just compile something to /usr/local). Where you had to create package definition with all dependencies explicitly defined.

Kind of like using FreeBSD ports (or Gentoo) without precompiled packages and you were forced to add every package manually before using. You would also complain it is hard even if you would have to just use Makefile and shell script.

I don't think this will get easier until Nix would get embraced by other package s, making it easy to specify those components as dependencies. Now with flakes with can be composable this is possible.

[IshKebab]

I agree with you. I can see the value of reproducibility, declarative system setup, etc.

I would love that. But there's no way I'm fighting software with such a bad UX.

[troutwine]

Two of the major differences between terraform and Nix that I see are 1. it’s possible to muddle through in terraform and 2. Hashicorp has put a non-trivial amount of effort into documentation for all levels of users. I’ve taken a stab at using Nix for Rust projects and could not even get to a point where I had something that functioned. I found plenty of material online but was it out of date, idiosyncratic, did it use flakes or not, etc etc? I suppose I could have contorted my existing project to meet the examples I found in various GitHub repos but my stuff is bog standard Rust so I don’t know that I’d be willing to. As for documentation, what should I, as a new and invested user, be looking for? Are flakes the future? Are they a distraction? Why are all the suggested docs I could find several year old guides on blogs? There’s 20 years of information floating around and the official project documentation, well, I don’t know who the audience is but it’s not learners.

It’s a shame. The promise of Nix/NixOS is really interesting — being able to deterministically create VMs with a custom user land is desirable to me — but in practice I can’t even get a simplistic project to compile, let alone something elaborate. Terraform is jank but it’s not a whole language that needs to be learned, seemingly, before the official docs start to become coherent in their underlying context.

[earthling8118]

I don't think it's very valid to compare the two. It is a little bit just to compare the experiences using them bit they aren't meant to solve the same set of issues. In fact, they are better together in my experience. I use nix to manage my terraform configurations with a lot of success. It reduces my boilerplate and helps me build abstractions on top of HCL.

If you ever decide to take a stab at nix again, consider looking at https://github.com/ipetkov/crane and using flakes. I've got it down to the point that I can get a new rust project set up with nix in about 30 seconds with linting, package building, and test running all in the checks

[troutwine]

Crane is one of the libraries(?) I came across. Couldn’t get it to work on an existing multi-crate workspace project. The crane documentation as-is didn’t provide enough context to debug the errors I saw in the process of trying to muddle through. And then looking further afield ran into all the documentation, bootstrapping issues I alluded to above. Although I don’t doubt I could start a new project the point was to add new capability to existing work, for me.

[rgoulter]

> We need to accept that "reproducibility" isn't quite working...

I guess it doesn't sell Nix as strongly as it could..

But, it's hardly for a lack of enthusiasm on Nix user's part. -- Rather, I've seen a few "what's nix good for anyway" comments, and this results in many lengthy replies extolling nix.

[soraminazuki]

Agreed, reproducibility is only one aspect of Nix and doesn't quite capture the whole picture. That's why so many newcomers see Nix as nothing more than a Docker replacement. There's also too much misconceptions about Nix the language that's scaring people off.

I'd like to see more being discussed about:

* Its unique ability to treat packages as programmable data (i.e., derivations)

* Its use case as a building block for deployment systems that knows about and integrates with packages

* Its JSON-like simplicity

They're all central to the Nix experience, and yet it's often overlooked in Nix discussions.

[Zurrrrr]

> Its unique ability to treat packages as programmable data (i.e., derivations)

How is this useful in practice?

[chriswarbo]

We find it immensely useful to program our packages (technically, "derivations"):

It's trivial to combine multiple packages into one, e.g. via the 'nixpkgs.buildEnv' function. We use this to define a package called 'tools', containing shells, linters, differs, VCS, converters, data processors, etc. Our devs only need to install one package; and if they find something useful enough to share with the team, they can add it to that 'tools' package.

This approach is also modular/compositional: we define a 'minimal-tools' package containing bash, coreutils, git, diffutils, sed, grep, archivers, compressors, etc. which is enough for most shell scripts. Our 'tools' package is defined using that 'minimal-tools' package, plus a bunch of more-interactive tools like process monitors, download managers, etc. The reason we made this modular is so each of our projects can include that 'minimal-tools' package in their development environments, alongside project-specific tooling like interpreters (NodeJS, Python, JVM, etc.), compilers, code formatters, etc. (depending on the whole 'tools' package felt like bloat, and was easy to avoid)

(Outside of work, my personal NixOS config takes this even further; defining different packages for e.g. media tools, development tools, document tools, audio tools, etc. and splitting those into separate packages for gui/cli tools. That's not particularly "useful in practice"; I just like to keep my system config organised!)

Another very common way of programming with packages is to override their definitions. For example, we override the whole of Nixpkgs to use the 'jre11_headless' JVM. This is done by the following 'overlay' function (all of the dependency-propagation happens automatically, since Nixpkgs uses laziness):

  self: super: {
    jre = super.adoptopenjdk-jre-hotspot-bin-11;
    jre_headless = self.jdk;
    jdk = super.jdk11_headless;
  }

Overriding is also useful for individual packages, e.g. if we want to alter something deep down a dependency chain. It's also useful for applying patches or running a "fixup" script to the source, without having to e.g. fork a git repo.

[VTimofeenko]

It's super easy to extend packages. For example, I was playing with Kafka and wanted the standard package to coexist with a separate install of Kafka with some jar files I needed. It was super easy to create a new package of Kafka with extra install steps that downloaded and placed those jar files where I needed.

[orbisvicis]

I'm surprised that nix never ended up using augeas for package configuration because last I checked every upstream build option has to be reproduced in nix script by the packager.

[soraminazuki]

It's easy enough for users to extend existing packages in Nix that it's never necessary for packagers to explicitly add support for every conceivable upstream build option out there. For example, the following three lines will create a new package based on an existing one with custom configure flags added.

    existingPackage.overrideAttrs (old: {
      configureFlags = old.configureFlags ++ [ "--custom-build-option" ];
    })

Package options that tweak the build flags are there for convenience and not a requirement. Many of them are there for internal use in the Nixpkgs repo to provide variants of the same package.

[comfypotato]

I wonder if the corporate backing behind Docker has anything to do with Nix being adopted less. There’s a lot of overlap between Nix and Docker, and Docker had major corporate guns behind it from early on. Reproducibility as you mentioned, is easily achieved with Docker, and there is no need to learn the Nix ecosystem.

Personally, I want to learn Nix, but Ive never forced myself to do it because it’s so much easier to make a Docker image do what I want. Nix is the pinnacle of a reproducible environment that doesn’t randomly break, but Docker is 80% of the way there and much easier.

It’s like comparing trucks (Docker) with planes (Nix) for logistics. I can pay out the wazoo for a plane to get my package there over night, or I can pay a small fraction to wait a few days.

[chriswarbo]

> Reproducibility as you mentioned, is easily achieved with Docker, and there is no need to learn the Nix ecosystem.

Docker isn't reproducible; I have no idea where this myth came from. The core feature of Docker is the ability to snapshot ("image") the result of a script ("Dockerfile"). That's no more "reproducible" than a statically-linked binary.

> Personally, I want to learn Nix, but Ive never forced myself to do it because it’s so much easier to make a Docker image do what I want. Nix is the pinnacle of a reproducible environment that doesn’t randomly break, but Docker is 80% of the way there and much easier.

Personally, I find Docker incredibly difficult. I finally bit the bullet when I took over maintenance of some systems at work, which had been written with Docker. The documentation was awful, the management systems keep falling over, and we have no idea what's actually running (it's tagged ":latest", but so is everything).

I avoid using anything Docker-related when I'm building new systems. It's easier to build container images with jq, tar and sha256sum anyway.

[comfypotato]

Docker serves the basic functionality of a container as well as any other. The workflows that forced you to migrate away from it are more complicated, I’m sure, than a procedurally defined dev environment.

What you’re calling a snapshot is what I meant when I said reproducible. Images allow me to have reproducible starting points to add other parts to my environment. Over time they get out of date depending on exactly what happens, but it’s much more controllable than a basic Ubuntu installation.

Your comment further pushes me away from Nix, really, even without mentioning it. It makes it seem even more like a tool that’s not for me, but rather for much more complicated things.

[chriswarbo]

> Docker serves the basic functionality of a container as well as any other

I disagree. We've had multiple production outages caused by the Docker daemon misbehaving (usually causing us to run out of disk space). It also makes operations far more difficult than necessary; e.g. want to copy a .tar.gz file to AWS? Sorry, Docker's gonna insert itself in the workflow, and over-complicate the authentication[1]. Instead, I have a script which runs [2] in a loop; much easier!

> The workflows that forced you to migrate away from it are more complicated, I’m sure, than a procedurally defined dev environment.

The container I mentioned literally just runs `java -jar` with a pre-built .jar file. Nothing fancy. Still, I have no idea what it's running, since Docker allows mutable tags, and there's no reference to a version number, let alone a git revision.

> Your comment further pushes me away from Nix, really, even without mentioning it. It makes it seem even more like a tool that’s not for me

I wasn't talking about Nix, I was talking about Docker. They're very different tools (Docker manages running processes/containers; Nix describes the contents of files). I just really hate Docker, and am baffled when people say it's "easy".

> but rather for much more complicated things.

You're giving me too much credit. It took me days to even get Docker installed. It turned out that despite a mountain of documentation telling me to install "Docker Machine", that's actually been discontinued for years and I should have been installing "Docker Desktop" instead.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/getti...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ecr/upload-...

[earthling8118]

On the other hand Docker was quite easy for me to install... because I used nix to do it.