this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I find Nix to be a really esoteric platform that completely inscrutable to a regular user. The people who do use it are extremely hostile to any tools that simplify the experience for the end user like Fleek. I would not recommend it for ANY regular user in any way, shape, or form.
Not my experience. It's more like benevolent disinterest when it comes to users who can't hack it on their own. The community is built around devops, functional programmers, as well as the odd enthusiast. Devops love it because it makes their work easier, functional programmer like its semantics and have no issue understanding it, and the odd enthusiast, well, is a hobbyist. If you're not one of those groups you're not catered for, it's as simple as that. And as far as "make things easier for normies" is concerned: Much of that hinges on flakes not just stabilising but everything being switched over to them. The community isn't going to start bending over backwards over features other people want to see, but not build themselves, but once the infrastructure is in place and it's easy, heck, why not.
Yeah this is unfortunately true. I love NixOS and I use it constantly but I'm also a professional developer so it's pretty easy for me. If I weren't I imagine it would be close to impossible.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to browse or understand how to use Nix, and the Nix language itself is quite opaque.
I love the results, but I wish it were done in ... basically anything other than Nix.
Theoretically there is Gnu Guix, which uses Guile... I have no clue what support for it is like though.
Nice to see a Guix mention! It's in flux but I appreciate it's motivation and the hard work being done. One language, kernel agnostic, functional to the core. It's gained some traction with the reproducible research builds crowd. It always makes me think of The Rise of Worse is Better.
Oh interesting, I haven't heard of it -- is it also for reproducible systems?
It's basically the nix system but maintained by the Gnu folks. That's about the extent of my knowledge honestly.
Yeah it's really nice when you just need a simple package or service setup. Anything not so common or needing a different version of the package can make it 100x more difficult for a regular user to do.