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by cloudripper 837 days ago
I use nix btw.

I totally agree. It (nix and nixos) is/are such a pain so often. But, wow... when you get things to work it is glorious.

Quickly and easily syncing system/user/application configurations across multiple devices is incredible. The declarative approach means that the often laborious effort it takes me to get things to work pays off when I finally figure it out and realize I never have to do that again - and since it's declarative, I now have a documented functional configuration/example to grow and expand from.

My current project is to learn Nix development environments by building "Linux from Scatch" from Nix. I am making progress slowly, but every success is cemented and replicatable.

LLMs definitely help distill the sparse/scattered documentation, but I am finding a good amount of grit is still required.

All in all, I am very much enjoying Nix and hope to utilize it more in my homelab.

3 comments

I just feel it doesn't have to be this way. We can get the benefits of nix without the hardness of nix. It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet.

It's annoying enough that I won't use nix personally. I've used it at work so I'm quite knowledgeable with it.

IMO, this thing is Nix, it just needs better UI and a lot better documentation.

The problem I've realized is that for many core Nix developers, the source is the documentation. Which doesnt scale.

Luckily the ecosystem is literally getting better by the hour right now. There's been a huge uptick in interest and lots of people are writing really good documentation and starter templates.
> It's just someone hasn't taken the time to make this "thing" yet.

DietPi [1] has one massive (15KLoC) bash script [2] for system config.

[1] https://dietpi.com

[2] https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/blob/master/dietpi/dietpi...

Not exactly an easy nix alternative
Easy for users, one step backup and restore of system-wide state.

Less easy for developers, but code is mature and stable in production for years.

> sparse/scattered documentation

I've been hearing more and more from people switching over to NixOS, so hopefully the docs will get better as well

I got into Guix and then failed. Now I realise it's because I didn't fully understand the nix philosophy underneath. Can you recommend any good tutorial points for an intermediate/experienced unix person?