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It's interesting how the people who "do things correctly" and the people who "do things usably" almost never are the same people. Could it be that these things

by vesak 8y ago

It's interesting how the people who "do things correctly" and the people who "do things usably" almost never are the same people. Could it be that these things are mutually exclusive? Anecdotally, I've tried to learn Nix for several years. I learned to write Dockerfiles in hours.

wahern 8y ago
It's not a coincidence that most Docker containers are built using Debian- or Red Hat-derived images. It's because they have proper packaging systems which are consistently applied, which is what allows them to build and maintain 10s of thousands of projects in a reusable format. The intersection of "correct" and "usable" substantially overlap; certainly much more so than "incorrect" and "usable". Don't confuse expedience with usability.
Sean1708 8y ago
> Anecdotally, I've tried to learn Nix for several years. Out of interest, what did you find difficult? I ask because I spent last weekend setting up NixOS, and the only things I found difficult were discoverability and documentation (I spent a lot of time just reading through the source code). Edit: Thinking about it it's very possible that this is just a case of me not knowing what I don't know, since I'm not currently trying to do anything particularly complex.
- vesak 8y ago
  Not sure if this is exactly what you meant by discoverability, but this page helps with at least seeing what configuration options are available: https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html# https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html# -- no other distro has anything similar as far as I know. The language is not too bad, but how it should be used is the missing part. Like a cookbook or a properly populated Stack Overflow site. When I was on Linux, I liked to distro hop few times a year. Whenever I got back to NixOS, I felt that I had to relearn everything, and that there was nothing to grasp on to. I always take that as a bad smell.

by vesak 8y ago

wahern 8y ago

It's not a coincidence that most Docker containers are built using Debian- or Red Hat-derived images. It's because they have proper packaging systems which are consistently applied, which is what allows them to build and maintain 10s of thousands of projects in a reusable format. The intersection of "correct" and "usable" substantially overlap; certainly much more so than "incorrect" and "usable". Don't confuse expedience with usability.

Sean1708 8y ago

> Anecdotally, I've tried to learn Nix for several years. Out of interest, what did you find difficult? I ask because I spent last weekend setting up NixOS, and the only things I found difficult were discoverability and documentation (I spent a lot of time just reading through the source code). Edit: Thinking about it it's very possible that this is just a case of me not knowing what I don't know, since I'm not currently trying to do anything particularly complex.

vesak 8y ago
Not sure if this is exactly what you meant by discoverability, but this page helps with at least seeing what configuration options are available: https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html# https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html# -- no other distro has anything similar as far as I know. The language is not too bad, but how it should be used is the missing part. Like a cookbook or a properly populated Stack Overflow site. When I was on Linux, I liked to distro hop few times a year. Whenever I got back to NixOS, I felt that I had to relearn everything, and that there was nothing to grasp on to. I always take that as a bad smell.