[charlotte-fyi]

Very exciting. The ideas behind Nix are so good and everything else so bad. It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve this by building abstractions on top of Nix, but I'm really skeptical that is the solution. As crazy as a full rewrite is, I hope someone succeeds!

[tombert]

Agreed. NixOS is a marvel of engineering to me, and kind of hard to go back from once you get used to it. Automatic snapshotting on every configuration change, the entire system state being configurable through text files and therefore never being ambiguous, being able to temporarily install stuff without it polluting your path for forever by using nix-shells, clearly being able to see and define stuff like boot parameters and kernel modules are just insanely wonderful things, all while still using (I think) a vanilla kernel and really no runtime overhead, allowing you to make an insanely lean system without ever being unsure if you're missing something or having to worry about extra crap that you installed by accident lingering forever. In my mind about as close to an "objectively better" way to handle an OS (at least for people who are technical) as one can ask for. I have no desire to go back to any other distro for my server.

But the Nix language itself is really quite annoying. I mean, I've more or less gotten used to its annoyances, and I do think that some of the DSLs it has are excellent (I really like the Nginx and systemd configuration stuff, for example), and a lot of the configs are just `services.myservice.enable = true` which is fine, but a lot of the time I'm kind of confused about what syntax is allowed and how loops work and the like. It's not horrible or anything, just a bit annoying because I'll occasionally have to do a nixos-rebuild like three or four times because I messed up some subtle syntax, and it's especially annoying if I have to go dig at the root Nix package to find out what I did wrong [1].

I think decentralizing stuff in the form of flakes might be able to help with this, if for no other reason the area in which you'd be forced to look for configuration stuff could be reduced, but I do think NixOS would benefit from some rearchitecture.

[1] Which happened yesterday with an ethernet card configuration: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.05/nixos/modu...

[whateveracct]

ever use nix repl? i found my complaints about grokkability disappeared once i realized i could easily introspect my build (and all my dependencies' builds) at any level.

that + learning the like 5 or so idioms that pervade nixpkgs and you can use Nix quite successfully imo.

[n8henrie]

Could you share an example of how you use nix repl? I use it every once in a while, but usually I'm starting from scratch and trying to replicate an error for debugging. It almost sounds like you're using the `--debugger` option (isn't there something like that?) which I've not had much luck with.

[whateveracct]

I use it to inspect various attributes of various packages.

When a build fails, I use the option to keep the output directory and inspect things. That's another main useful method.