Yeah Nix seems like an insanely useful concept (declarative, reproducable, diffable, source controllable definitions of linux environments). But actually using it is a nightmare.
I think there's some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix that would be useful, I don't know what it is though. Containerization is kinda like this, but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative and I wouldn't really want to use a docker container as my main system environment.
I run NixOS on every computer I'm allowed to install it and I really don't think it's hard to use, just different. Adapting to a new workflow is hard, but I don't know that NixOS is intrinsically more difficult than any other Linux.
I wouldn't want a docker container as my main environment, but I do like having NixOS managing my main environment for a few reasons.
First, the declarative nature of everything makes it clear and easy to know what is actually installed on my computer. I can simply look at my configuration file and see if a program is installed, and if it's not. If I want to uninstall something, I delete the program from the configuration.nix and rebuild. This might not seem insignificant, but to me it's game changing. How many times have you uninstalled things in Ubuntu or something and had a ton of lingering transitive dependencies? How many times have you been trying to debug a problem, end up installing a million things, and then painstakingly having to track down every unnecessary dependency and transitive dependency that you ended up installing, only to miss something for months? Maybe most people here are better at this than I am, but these things happened to me all the time.
Second, the declarative nature of NixOS makes snapshotting trivial. Again, this is game-changing for me, and it makes fixing stuff on my computer more fun and less scary. If I break something, all I have to do is reboot and choose the last generation, then fix it.
This might not seem like a big deal, and again maybe for people smarter than me it's not, but for me it completely changed the way I deal with computers. When I first started using Ubuntu, when I would do something like break the video driver or the WiFi driver, I would end up having to nuke the system and start again, because I would get into a state where I didn't know how to fix it. I probably could fix these things now, I've been doing this stuff for awhile, but even still, it's nice to be able to not ever have to worry about getting into a state like that.
> [...] but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative [...]
The conceptual problem with Docker isn't imperative vs declarative. It's that Docker doesn't even try to be reproducible. Executing the same Dockerfile twice doesn't necessarily build you the same container.
(Imperative vs declarative is still an interesting problem to think about, it's just independent of reproducibility in the abstract.)
I'm also one of the people who have tried Nix(OS) a couple of times and found it too much of a hassle, but nightmare is exaggerating a bit, I feel.
Nix's strength and weakness is that it wants to take over everything, and if you want to do something without it, you might be in a world of pain. And after doing more or less standard unixy things for 20+ years, it's difficult to hand over control to a new thing like that.
I honestly wonder why there are such divergent opinions between say git and Nix? (I've never used Nix, but I use git all the time) Is Nix so much harder to use than git?
git also has a clear model (the Merkle tree of file and directory nodes) but a famously unfriendly UI (git checkout does 5 or more unrelated things)
Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day.
Why the difference with Nix? Maybe because building packages is inherently slower. Whereas you can quickly get yourself intro trouble with git, but you can also quickly get out of trouble (rm -rf, git clone)
Maybe Nix is more stateful? Although the git index/staging area I find to be a fabulously odd piece of state, and honestly breaks all the rules when I think about CLIs
Also Nix does rely on a very big global repo, whereas git doesn't
It also seems that Nix's model is less clean, and perhaps doesn't match the problem domain as well ... there are disagreements on whether it is "reproducible", etc.
> some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix
That would be configuration management tools such as Salt/Puppet/Ansible/Chef.
They were popular ten years ago, and gained a lot of exposure as the devops movement gained ground, but they never stopped being useful.
Having your non-running state defined declarative is powerful, and if you can define a single source of truth for entire distributed systems, that suddenly makes you able to reason about state on whole systems.
For what it’s worth, nothing in this article is really necessarily for general usage of Nix, as the derivation format is mostly abstracted-away, like how the OCI image format is irrelevant to everyday authoring of Dockerfiles.
p1necone|10 months ago
I think there's some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix that would be useful, I don't know what it is though. Containerization is kinda like this, but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative and I wouldn't really want to use a docker container as my main system environment.
tombert|10 months ago
I wouldn't want a docker container as my main environment, but I do like having NixOS managing my main environment for a few reasons.
First, the declarative nature of everything makes it clear and easy to know what is actually installed on my computer. I can simply look at my configuration file and see if a program is installed, and if it's not. If I want to uninstall something, I delete the program from the configuration.nix and rebuild. This might not seem insignificant, but to me it's game changing. How many times have you uninstalled things in Ubuntu or something and had a ton of lingering transitive dependencies? How many times have you been trying to debug a problem, end up installing a million things, and then painstakingly having to track down every unnecessary dependency and transitive dependency that you ended up installing, only to miss something for months? Maybe most people here are better at this than I am, but these things happened to me all the time.
Second, the declarative nature of NixOS makes snapshotting trivial. Again, this is game-changing for me, and it makes fixing stuff on my computer more fun and less scary. If I break something, all I have to do is reboot and choose the last generation, then fix it.
This might not seem like a big deal, and again maybe for people smarter than me it's not, but for me it completely changed the way I deal with computers. When I first started using Ubuntu, when I would do something like break the video driver or the WiFi driver, I would end up having to nuke the system and start again, because I would get into a state where I didn't know how to fix it. I probably could fix these things now, I've been doing this stuff for awhile, but even still, it's nice to be able to not ever have to worry about getting into a state like that.
eru|10 months ago
The conceptual problem with Docker isn't imperative vs declarative. It's that Docker doesn't even try to be reproducible. Executing the same Dockerfile twice doesn't necessarily build you the same container.
(Imperative vs declarative is still an interesting problem to think about, it's just independent of reproducibility in the abstract.)
darthrupert|10 months ago
Nix's strength and weakness is that it wants to take over everything, and if you want to do something without it, you might be in a world of pain. And after doing more or less standard unixy things for 20+ years, it's difficult to hand over control to a new thing like that.
chubot|10 months ago
git also has a clear model (the Merkle tree of file and directory nodes) but a famously unfriendly UI (git checkout does 5 or more unrelated things)
Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day.
Why the difference with Nix? Maybe because building packages is inherently slower. Whereas you can quickly get yourself intro trouble with git, but you can also quickly get out of trouble (rm -rf, git clone)
Maybe Nix is more stateful? Although the git index/staging area I find to be a fabulously odd piece of state, and honestly breaks all the rules when I think about CLIs
Also Nix does rely on a very big global repo, whereas git doesn't
It also seems that Nix's model is less clean, and perhaps doesn't match the problem domain as well ... there are disagreements on whether it is "reproducible", etc.
Or maybe it's just a harder problem
xorcist|10 months ago
That would be configuration management tools such as Salt/Puppet/Ansible/Chef.
They were popular ten years ago, and gained a lot of exposure as the devops movement gained ground, but they never stopped being useful.
Having your non-running state defined declarative is powerful, and if you can define a single source of truth for entire distributed systems, that suddenly makes you able to reason about state on whole systems.
o11c|10 months ago
amarshall|10 months ago
drowsspa|10 months ago