[amarshall]

I don’t know anyone who is recommending against flakes these days. The “experimental” label is more about the API stability than completeness, bugginess, or anything else.

There are certain scenarios where the performance can be problematic, but there are workarounds and permanent solutions are being worked on. Nevertheless, using flakes extensively at home and work.

[Qwertious]

>I don’t know anyone who is recommending against flakes these days. The “experimental” label is more about the API stability than completeness, bugginess, or anything else.

"Experimental" traditionally means "if you use it and it breaks, then that's your fault". This is because if <experimental thing> did break, the entire internet would dogpile on any complainers with "IT WAS LABELLED EXPERIMENTAL WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING."

It's the same as ignoring Kickstarter warnings; if a project gives you a warning then tell you to ignore that same warning, don't; if things go to shit then everyone will say "YOU WERE WARNED WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING." They cannot un-warn you, that's not how this social situation works. I'm not claiming this is fair, I'm just claiming this is how it plays out in practice.

The only safe response to this is to assume that anything labelled "experimental" is exactly what it says. And to be clear, that means the only safe response is to ignore any claims that the thing labelled "experimental" is safe.

Or to put it another way: if you don't mean it's experimental and do recommend it to the average user, then don't use the term "experimental".

[pxc]

Here's the closest thing to an 'unwarning' that can exist, which is a tl;dr of the history:

The experimental label is a historical compromise because flakes, which was conceived by the original author of Nix (who is still a maintainer), was a major change merged to master without going through the whole Nix community RFC process (which was then in its infancy).

So it was added, but tucked away behind an 'experimental' designation and enablement flag. This proved controversial at the time and perhaps still is among old timers, but in the interim flakes have become enormously popular with new users (probably most people who picked up Nix in the past 3 years or so).

Third-party adoption of flakes has by now reached the point that the vast majority of big tools in the Nix ecosystem support it well. Some interfaces are still officially unstable but serious breakage is pretty rare. The flakes implementation in the codebase is very usable but still incomplete and still a bit buggy, and straightening out the kinks in the implementation as well as stabilizing the interfaces (both for Nix code and the CLI) is careful, patient work under way right now.

Hence the common recommendation to just use 'em unless you have deep Nix knowledge and a specific reason not to.