[Modified3019]

My recent experience being tech support for family and trying to make available some sort of digitized preservation of family photos/history, has been impressing upon me the need to get away from Rube Goldberg systems that only I could possibly understand and modify. My primary filesystem being ZFS already makes having my stuff be accessible to others after my death a bit unrealistic. (Part of my strategy, will be physical redundancy with archival disks and HDDs, and even paper for text information)

I’m forever intrigued by the promises of nix, but I have finally accepted that I am not the target audience for what they have built. The nix language is fundamentally at odds with general purpose usability. Even using the package manger on other distros is fraught with gotchas.

On an off topic note, I find it fascinating how both my father and grandfather, who are/were quite technically competent, seem to become increasingly and possibly willfully helpless about computers as they get older. I find myself wondering if at some point I will also experience exhaustion of whatever internal energy is needed to fuel technical fluency.

[microtonal]

The nix language is fundamentally at odds with general purpose usability.

I have contributed or tried to contribute to many distributions (heck, I even worked for a commercial Linux distribution when I was young) and contributing to nixpkgs was an order of magnitude easier than other distributions. Part of it was the GitHub/PR-centered workflow, but the other part is that Nix is a small functional language and the package definitions are not in some arcane weird format like RPM spec files or Debian rules. Also, Nix makes it much easier to refine a derivation/package without actually having to install it on your system.

[pxc]

I want to second this experience. I've never actually submitted my contributions upstream for other distros, but I've maintained repositories for personal use for Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch, Gentoo, CentOS and Fedora.

Writing a new package from scratch based on Nixpkgs is far easier than for other distros, and easy packaging tasks are much easier with Nixpkgs than with other distributions.

(It's also much easier to distribute packages without standing up new infrastructure with Nix, since it's source-based and will fall back to source-based builds if you have no established mechanism for distributing binaries.)