Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year? | rugu
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  • NostraDavid@programming.dev
    2·
    10 hours ago

    I don’t need reproducibility to the extent that NixOS provides

    Alright, that’s fair. As a programmer, I’ve been having a blast using it - being able to quickly setup my laptops almost the same as my desktop is such a breath of fresh air, then being able to copy over most of my config to a WSL setup to employ nix to get there 90% of the way on a Debian or Ubuntu WSL system is just so nice.

    But if you don’t need its features, or aren’t a programmer, I can very much imagine you’d rather stick to a more stateful system.

  • matejc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    I read the article, this is not the first time that people think of Nix/NixOS like so. Its a standard case of wanting to use Nix ecosystem to the fullest, but you do not need to. You need to find the balance for yourself and that is different from person to person. I am using NixOs for about 9 years, and in whole that time I have never felt overwhelmed. People are just different.

  • epyon22@programming.dev
    28·
    2 days ago

    I came to the same conclusion. If I have a problem that I know nixos can solve it’s useful tool in my belt. But man you try to do anything out side the box the learning curve is massive. Good for those that know but when you only get to tinker a few times a week for a couple hours just getting things to work can be fun at first but gets old very quick.

    • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      33·
      2 days ago

      Okay sure, but that’s like trying to use iOS and then saying it’s too restrictive. NixOS is pretty clear on what it offers and what it can do.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
      72·
      1 day ago

      Ok, so preface: this isn’t about you. Your comment just coalesced something I’ve been ruminating about recently.

      I wish we, as humans, didn’t have this knee-jerk tenancy to make everything a zero-sum competition. Vi vs EMACS. x86 vs ARM. Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs FreeBSD. C vs Go vs Rust vs Clojure vs JavaScript. Arch vs the world.

      It really is a zero-sum game, with real consequences. If your favorite distro becomes unpopular enough, it might die, and then you have to give up something you love. Windows winning the OS market for decades meant countless people had to suffer using Windows because the company they worked for mandated it. If I crusade for V(lang) enough, it might become popular enough for jobs to open for it.

      The downside is that we’re constantly fighting against diversity, and that’s bad.

      I suffer from this as much as anyone, and I hate that my first impulse is to either tear down “the opposition”, which at some point is nearly everyone, or schadenfreude.

      “It is not enough that I succeed, but that others should fail.” It can’t be healthy.

      • tisktisk@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        I feel we’ve identified a problem quite well, but I’m at more of a loss for a solution-oriented perspective? And also, VI x86 and Gentoo for life!

        • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          I have no idea! It seems to be the human material. Have you ever heard of a solution? I can be aware of it and resist it, but what I hate is that instinctive, negative impulse, and I don’t think wishing it away is going to help.

          • tisktisk@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            Recognize tools for what they are? Just tools that accomplish task(s) Also don’t forget how boring life is without some competition to keep the spirit lively

    • recursive_recursion@piefed.caEnglish
      331·
      1 day ago

      My personal nixos config

      dude, I learned and used NixOS for 2 years and I found it incredibly challenging as some of the documentation is fragmented to the point where you have to delve into several hundreds of others configurations to fix singular problems. Some issues are actually impossible to solve (unless you have months of time off and proficiency with Nix) as NixOS is not FHS compliant.

      The langauge Nix is not Nix the package manager, Nix is NixOS the OS.

      In addition, good luck with finding what you want as sometimes it’s unsearchable as the devs decided not to distinguish the 3 from each other.
      Why? I have no idea.

      I haven’t even mentioned Nix Flakes which is it’s own level of complexity due to it’s experimental but recommended status by the community.

      Perhaps it’s a skill issue but I feel that I’ve spent my 2 years of due diligence to know that it’s still quite rough on the edges.

      At this point I’m personally moving back to Arch.
      I’ll be experimenting with Gentoo sometime in the near future but at this point it’s very unlikely I’ll ever revisit Nix and NixOS especially since Valve is doing fantastic work in collaboaration with the Arch Linux devs.

      For all I’ve said above

      Because reading the docs is too hard for an imbecile?

      Please reconsider before posting future antagonistic and abbrasive comments as it does no favors to you nor the community and only paints a target on your back👍

      Nix and NixOS are not easy beasts to tame as advanced help is sparce and individual challenges can be quite niche such that help cannot be readily found.

      • littleomid@feddit.orgEnglish
        81·
        2 days ago

        ## Windows emulator. bottles wine winetricks

        Wine Is Not an Emulator! 😀

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I agree completely, I still think that for some things Nix is the most convenient thing, e.g. when packaging cross-compiled images of the apps, but I would never be able to build this from ground up, and whenever something breaks it’s a pain to fix. Using NixOS on Mac at least taught me how it works more or less, and it mostly does except for when it doesn’t and I’m in it deep

    • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      19·
      2 days ago

      I’m gonna be honest, I use NixOS, but the docs fucking suck, and a number of things are just broken in nixpkgs. For instance, I recently discovered the structuredExtraConfig option for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options, which means some kernel patches won’t work unless you manually supply the entire kernel config.

      EDIT: what’s even more annoying about it not working is that it fails to apply silently. In other words, your kernel tries to compile and then an hour later it fails because your config changes weren’t applied.

    • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
      21·
      2 days ago

      If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner’s manual for every car you’ve owned? If you’re a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?

      At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don’t need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.

      • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
        17·
        2 days ago

        I suspect this attitude of “read the fucken manuel” comes from when tooling was simpler and you could actually read all the manuals (or buy a book) to learn every small bit of it. Today, I’d be surprised if someone actually read all the Windows, .Net, and Powershell docs before attempting to write a small script.

        Heck, even simpler things like Python have massive docs beneath every layer of them. You don’t learn everything from the ground up anymore, only the relevant parts to your use case.

    • bitcrafter@programming.dev
      19·
      2 days ago

      I cannot speak on behalf of the article author, but as someone who personally is an imbecile, the answer is: definitely!