[stayfrosty420]

Nix reminds me about that xkcd comic about standards. It seems to be to be solving a problem solved in a much better way by other alternatives with the mindset of IT from a bygone era.

I may just not really be the target demo, or maybe am just a huge idiot, but I struggle to see the appeal, especially when you hear about the occasional horror stories about complex and/or broken environments, or the vim-like overhead to learn it properly.

[kaba0]

No package manager before Nix solved the whole problem at all. Nix is the first of its kind.

A good litmus test: install the gnome and the kde desktop envs on your linux system with your preferred package manager. Now remove both. Will you get back to a fresh install state? And it’s not even a hard problem yet.

Now how would it solve installing a second chromium browser that uses a patched libc beneath?

[drdaeman]

> or the vim-like overhead to learn it properly.

In my opinion, it's somewhat simpler than learning how to do Debian packaging properly (with emphasis on "properly", following all the modern best practices).

Quite a lot of folks that run Nix or NixOS write themselves decent derivations that could be (and frequently are) contributed to nixpkgs (of course, there are a lot of quirks/hacks as well). But I think quite a few folks who run Debian make themselves high-quality packages - e.g. why bother setting up cowbuilder and do the proper repo for gbp with all the pristine-tar branch oddities, when checkinstall does the trick.

[stayfrosty420]

Ah, I will concede I probably am just a huge idiot then. I suppose I don't often find myself needing to bootstrap a linux OS in this way.

[SuperSandro2000]

I don't know of anything before nix comparable to it but I happily learn something new.