[CapeTheory]

I like the idea of it, but the Nix people seem to have really screwed the pooch. On the social front we have tedious community discussions about whether it is OK to be funded by a defence contractor, and on the technical front the switch to new Nix commands and flakes has left the documentation in a horrible mess. I think if things had gone differently over the last 18 months we could've seen some really significant adoption, but I have no hope of that any more.

[agubelu]

I think one of the issues with Nix's community is that they see using Nix as a goal on its own, not as a means to an end.

99.5% percent of people don't use Docker because they have a passion for writing dockerfiles, or because they find the ideas behind Docker elegant. They use it as a tool to help build other things. Meanwhile, the Nix community keeps pushing out these ideas about how Nix _works_ ("reproducible builds!", "lazy evaluation!") but they don't seem to particularly care about making Nix easy to use for the majority of the population out there who may want to use Nix as tool and don't care about its technical merits.

On top, I think most projects would benefit from having more functional programming advocates in them. Nix suffers from the opposite problem: it would benefit from having _less_ passionate FP people in it. Nix the language is pretty inscrutable for lots of people.

[viraptor]

I'm not sure this can really be simplified without changing a lot of the system. Or maybe even at all, without sacrificing some of the current features.

If your threshold is based on the inscrutable language, I'm not sure that can be really solved by anyone in nix community at this point. You're just looking for a different solution, and that's fine. But nixos still solves real, practical issues for many people.

[agubelu]

I'm not saying that it doesnt. We use both Nix and NixOS at work.

I'm just saying that, if the goal is mainstream adoption, the core team should acknowledge that people will use Nix as a means to an end, and not for the sake of using it as they do.

[viraptor]

> and not for the sake of using it as they do.

You're creating your own ideas of why people do things and presenting them as facts. Please don't, it's neither useful in the discussion nor nice.

[wkearney99]

But they are right though. And casting them as 'not nice' is in itself not nice.

[viraptor]

Are you relying what the authors personally told you, or would you like to point to where they wrote that online?

[arianvanp]

Our contributor graph is still growing exponentially and seems mostly unaffected. I'm not too scared about it. There is a lot of work to do though. Especially if we want to go mainstream

[poincaredisk]

>on the technical front the switch to new Nix commands and flakes has left the documentation in a horrible mess

Did it ever happen? Last I've checked flakes were still experimental.

[viraptor]

Nope. Flakes are only mentioned in a handful of places in the official docs and almost always as "this accepts flake as input". Never as something you should try using (even the format is not explained).

[CapeTheory]

OK, to be more accurate when I say "documentation" I really mean "widespread online messaging about Nix". At least everywhere I've looked, existing Nix users advocate for starting with flakes now on the basis that it will be the new normal soon.