[rebeccaskinner]

I think it's great to document this, and some people are going to prefer working with containers no matter what. That said, personally I've moved away from it and these days I just use nixos modules and run all of the services on my home server directly on the host. You don't get the same isolation that you might get with proper containers, and that might be an issue for production machines, but I find the simplicity is a win for a home server.

[lolinder]

If you're after simplicity, it's hard to beat docker compose for self hosting stuff. I run NixOS on my laptop and routinely run into things that aren't yet packaged for NixOS, but I've yet to come across a project where I had to write my own dockerfile.

[rebeccaskinner]

Personally I’ve always found working with docker to be pretty frustrating, especially dealing with docker compose. Most of what I run on my server is at least in nixpkgs already if not already a NixOS module, and I just find it less frustrating to write nix than to deal with Docker.

That said, I know nix pretty well at this point and I would probably have a different opinion if I hadn’t spent so much time learning nix.

[lolinder]

> That said, I know nix pretty well at this point and I would probably have a different opinion if I hadn’t spent so much time learning nix.

Yeah, I'm in exactly the opposite boat—I've been using docker professionally and at home for 5+ years now and know it very well, while nix is still very new to me!

There's probably no way to objectively tell which one we'd have preferred if we started in the opposite order.