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by Modified3019 630 days ago
Yeah I ended up with the same issue. While I’m technically inclined, I’m not nearly to the point where I can handle the fire hose of (badly named) abstraction at all levels like some people.

I could never have pulled off what this guy did https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/03/07/qubes-lite-with-kv..., though ironically his journal is probably one of the best “how nix actually works” tutorials I’ve ever seen, even though it isn’t intended for that or complete for such a purpose. He’s the only reason I know that a derivation is basically an intermediate build object.
1 comments
hinkley 629 days ago
I'm about to start a project where I thought Nix might be useful. What do I need to watch out for? Where is it going to piss me off and send me back to Docker?
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kstenerud 629 days ago
There are no guardrails. Whenever something goes wrong, you'll get weird cryptic errors in a seemingly unrelated area and have no clue how to fix it until you post to a support group to discover that you put a comma in the wrong place.

You'll spend a LOT of time fighting the system, which gets old fast. Docker may have a sucky plan format (and they STILL won't let you set your goddamn MAC address), but it's good enough for most things and not too terrible to learn.

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kstenerud 629 days ago
Oh, and my personal favorite: Programming by maps.

Any time you put in a key that it doesn't recognize, it just gets ignored. So you get to spend hours/days trying to figure out why the hell your system won't do what you told it to, and won't even validate that what you put in makes sense.

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