[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 Over time they get out of date depending on exactly what happens, but it’s much more controllable than a basic Ubuntu installation.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.