[BwackNinja]

This seems emblematic of the general direction of technology. It's an approach to managing system complexity that works by adding additional complexity and handling that combination well as long as you use their tools. Nix isn't special in this -- all (non-derivative) Linux distros do exactly that, though that's probably little more than an extension of having written a package manager. I dislike higher level tools like this because they discourage understanding of anything below them. The filesystem is no longer organized in a human-readable fashion, it is an implementation detail.

I'd love to see more concerted efforts going the other direction -- managing complexity by working to make the system simpler and compartmentalizing additional functionality. System snaps, now packaging lxd and cups, are probably the closest mainstream example today.

[nurple]

IMO, the complexity is an important aspect of the Sisyphean drive that life seems to have to reverse the action we call the second law of thermodynamics. I highly recommend reading The Animate and the Inanimate[0] by William Sidis.

However, I do agree that there is a lot of unnecessary complexity in our tech stacks today; though I blame much of this on how young the concept of computing and information theory still is. We're still exploring, we're still building, and it's really exciting to me to have the opportunity to work in a space that is only in its infancy. There is so much room for almost anyone in the field to bring innovations and improvements, if only so many of us weren't slaves to grinding our bones, and finite time, to dust creating things of dubious moral value under an almost singular focus on monetary wealth and the threat of death and ostracism.

[0] https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf

[qazxcvbnm]

I must say that as far as I'm concerned, Nix is very much emblematic of simpler technology. Nix tries to solve problems (such as build impurities) very much by trying to fix things at the source (and contributing back to upstream!), rather than slapping things that work on top of each other, mindlessly using magic like containers. That's one of the reasons why I adore nixpkgs, that they have heroically attempted to fix problems in packages at their sources, and have very much succeeded.

[effie]

> rather than slapping things that work on top of each other, mindlessly using magic like containers.

I have exactly this problem. I need to run centos7-era binary application on rocky9, and of course, it does not compile on the new gcc compiler in rocky9, and also some libraries are missing/have changed too much.

I was thinking I will run the app in a centos7 container on rocky9 machine, but this creates lots of unwelcome complications and additional work.

I'm not very familiar with Nix, but it seems one could install Nix on rocky9 and then somehow use it to build my application against the centos7 devel libraries. Do you think this is a plausible pathway for compiling and running such an old application? It would be great if I could just compile the old app on the new system and forget about containers.

[gipp]

Sounds like https://gokrazy.org/ might be of interest to you.