> Claims of Nix is too hard are like the BTRFS is unstable camp (which thankfully has mostly died out): they're holdovers from when these things were true.
This is a grossly misleading comparison. Or at least, it's maybe not the comparison you want to make.
btrfs being unstable persists for a couple of reasons:
- Even casual users have pretty much zero tolerance for a filesystem that self-destructs. Especially when the filesystem integrates RAID and snapshot functionality, so self-destructing takes backup infrastructure with it.
- There are features that are legitimately unstable (RAID5/6), have unexpected side effects (defragmenting breaking reflinks), and seem unfinished (dedup requires external tools)
Nix being too hard to use comes from, well, the stuff I mentioned, which is all from the last few years. Or, the laptop I installed NixOS on just this year, where the install finished, and then the user is left without any guidance how to set up their system. For me, that's OK; I can fire up a terminal and run nano then rebuild the system.
But for any first-time user, I'd expect them to be SOL and stuck spending a Linux evening digging through the Nix manuals to figure out how to configure their system. (I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`)
If they're a DevOps user who's going to be using it for every day of their job, that's probably time well spent; but if they're a casual user who only wants to maintain the same set of software and settings whenever they get a new computer, it may just be more time-efficient to go through some pain every several years.
For even a power user, they probably need to be working with a lot of software projects with native dependencies, or switching between computers a lot. Or just specifically curious about Nix.
But in any case, I very much disagree that it's just an out-of-date reputation that's holding Nix back. Its functionality is really, really useful and widespread adoption would make language-specific tools somewhat redundant (eg virtualenv). I'm pretty sure the main thing holding it back is that it's just too hard to use and people silently abandon it.
> btrfs being unstable persists for a couple of reasons
Fedora uses it by default as does openSUSE. Meta uses it for thousands of their own servers. The very specific RAID configuration is a non-issue for 99.9 percent of people. If they have need of it they'll use something else.
> I'm pretty sure the main thing holding it back is that it's just too hard to use and people silently abandon it.
That's why you use the tools to make it easy. Use the Determinate Nix installer, then install Fleek. I haven't read the Nix manual in at least 5 years.
> But for any first-time user, I'd expect them to be SOL and stuck spending a Linux evening digging through the Nix manuals to figure out how to configure their system. (I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`)
What? This is not what most users will be doing, no.
> The very specific RAID configuration is a non-issue for 99.9 percent of people
"Very specific" being the most common RAID configuration used outside of personal computing (when you have more than 2-3 disks, you aren't running RAID1/RAID0/RAID10, it's all RAID 5/6). And funnily, one of the main scenarios where an advanced filesystem is actually genuinely needed and not just a nice to have, is when you have lots of disks.
Ad hoc shell environments
Reproducible interpreted scripts
Towards reproducibility: pinning Nixpkgs
Declarative shell environments with shell.nix
None of which covers what you'd probably want to do after you've freshly installed Nix or NixOS, eg system configuration and package management.
Having officially ordained instructions isn't just a convenience for n00bs, it's also useful for knowing what needs to be maintained whenever there are changes, and consolidating effort to continually improve upon the presentation (rather than everybody having their own blog post just from their perspective).
> I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`
So many people get started with Nix, not NixOS. Once see how useful it is, they then begin migrating their existing systems over to NixOS.
Not only that, but ad hoc shell environments are one the most common use cases. Putting that in the forefront of the official documentation is helpful. I also somehow can't help but think that if the official documentation followed your advice and started off with configuration.nix before explaining the Nix basics, you'd have a problem with that just the same.
This is a grossly misleading comparison. Or at least, it's maybe not the comparison you want to make.
btrfs being unstable persists for a couple of reasons:
- Even casual users have pretty much zero tolerance for a filesystem that self-destructs. Especially when the filesystem integrates RAID and snapshot functionality, so self-destructing takes backup infrastructure with it.
- There are features that are legitimately unstable (RAID5/6), have unexpected side effects (defragmenting breaking reflinks), and seem unfinished (dedup requires external tools)
Nix being too hard to use comes from, well, the stuff I mentioned, which is all from the last few years. Or, the laptop I installed NixOS on just this year, where the install finished, and then the user is left without any guidance how to set up their system. For me, that's OK; I can fire up a terminal and run nano then rebuild the system.
But for any first-time user, I'd expect them to be SOL and stuck spending a Linux evening digging through the Nix manuals to figure out how to configure their system. (I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`)
If they're a DevOps user who's going to be using it for every day of their job, that's probably time well spent; but if they're a casual user who only wants to maintain the same set of software and settings whenever they get a new computer, it may just be more time-efficient to go through some pain every several years.
For even a power user, they probably need to be working with a lot of software projects with native dependencies, or switching between computers a lot. Or just specifically curious about Nix.
But in any case, I very much disagree that it's just an out-of-date reputation that's holding Nix back. Its functionality is really, really useful and widespread adoption would make language-specific tools somewhat redundant (eg virtualenv). I'm pretty sure the main thing holding it back is that it's just too hard to use and people silently abandon it.
reply