[throwaway8481]

I liked Nix, because it worked very well to reproduce "the same system" every time. However, it became unmanageable and a huge time sink to constantly remake how I scripted together my nix flakes per the current/modern way of doing that. And then finding a repository of how someone else managed this on Github and rewriting my configuration again.

Nix ultimately made me feel like I was running Gentoo. Excellent build system, but I could not invest the time in learning ebuilds, and I could not invest the time in using Nix's language to manage its packages. It was just a huge time sink and baggage to maintain.

rpm-ostree is lowering the barrier to entry greatly to produce layered [open container] images that we can rebase off of. That is the future among all this atomic stuff. It would be entirely possible to /someday/ build a system with the nix toolset, then commit the image through rpm-ostree, and have others rebase from it. Best of both.

In the future, with immutable systems, it probably also means being able to have those very robust update systems in place like Chromebooks where you update and switch to partition B with the new image, while having the fallback on partition A. It would also probably make it easier to verify and sign these images for secure boot purposes so then enabling secure boot on Linux becomes easier/convenient, and the secure default.

I still think the Nix language is yet another language I don't see the value in. I'm not learning this, or becoming comfortable in this language, or convincing myself it's a comfortable language to use ...just to maintain my 2-3 laptops when I don't use Nix anywhere else.

Time sink. But a very solid system.

PS: I want them to layer everything on Fedora CoreOS. Make CoreOS the secure thin base, then create all these atomic "Spins" as a derivation of CoreOS.

[Cu3PO42]

I have also invested a hugely disproportionate amount of time in writing my Nix config. However, that is only because I found it fun to massively over-engineer everything and wanted to make my work easily usable for others.

That said, I could have gotten away with significantly less and I'm really not sure what you're referring to with having to remake your Flake. I'm not aware that the output schema changed over the last years. Could you provide an example of what caused you to rewrite your configuration?

I'm not doubting your experience, the documentation situation is not great and I could absolutely see someone getting stuck in a situation where they felt they needed to start over. I'd just like to know what the community could do to avoid these pitfalls.

[darthrupert]

I'm using nixos and I never really needed to "learn the language". I used the installer, which gave me sensible defaults, and now I just dump more and more stuff to my configuration.nix as I need it.

Their website contains plenty of examples to copy/paste and since the distro is already prett old, chatgpt can easily help too.

Ok so perhaps my config isn't the prettiest but who cares. It works and it's a record of what my system is.

[exe34]

I never got around to the flakes thing - if something isn't already in the repos nowadays, I lose interest quite quickly. It's really helped with just getting on with life instead of futzing around with settings. What does work, is rock solid.