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Guix seems interesting but I almost stopped reading when I read "Nix". For all the benefits the Nix ecosystem provides, they haven't crossed the usability gap f

Guix seems interesting but I almost stopped reading when I read "Nix". For all the benefits the Nix ecosystem provides, they haven't crossed the usability gap for me. First was naming their packages so confusingly, Nix the language vs NixOS vs Nix the package manager. Then there's the whole promise of it being usable from multiple platforms ("you don't even have to use NixOS, just use the package manager for awesome builds") -- It was supposedly amazing for building some software packages, but the reality was always so sticky and never quite panned out. To be fair I have seen/heard lots praise it a lot for delivering stability to the servers they manage, but in this day and age, I'm not sure it's even worth trying to learn something to manage servers when the cattle approach is so much better (just shoot it). Even when stateful applications get involved, distributed storage is springing up to make it easier than ever to take down a server but have the data it had still be accessible, granted it was replicated, and sync if/when the machine ever comes back up. If the world evolves in that direction, it seems like people will only care about packages at VM/container/whatever base layer build time. Don't want to be the downer here but I don't think it's likely that Guix is going to cross the usability chasm. I've invested a lot of time/interest/effort in projects that were better, but never crossed the usability/mindshare chasm and while I hope I'm wrong, this feels like some of the other ones. Completely unrelated to that though, this quote rang true to me: > Guix is a fork of Nix and addresses the main issue that Nix didn’t get right: instead of comming up with a homebrewed domain-specific language (DSL) with its own set of limitations and idiosyncrasies, Guix uses a full-fledged programming language. (And a good one at that, since it’s Guile Scheme, a Lisp-based language.) I think Hashicorp has this problem with HCL (see the recent updates[0] announced at the last HashiConf, the `for` keyword is now in HCL) -- though I'm not recommending they fix the problem with lisp, people need to stop making DSLs then bridging the gap between their DSL and a full programming language. I much prefer the Pulumi[1]'s approach -- though it leaves devs lots of rope to hang themselves with ("recursive infrastructure building functions...why not?"). [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/keynote-terraform-free-saas-tier-hcl-upgrades https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/keynote-terraform-free-s... [1]: https://pulumi.io/reference/how.html https://pulumi.io/reference/how.html

sterlind 8y ago
NixOS fangirl here... you're totally right about usability! Git was self-hosting from day 3, but consisted only of a few pieces of exposed plumbing. As more porcelain was bolted on, it got to the point where flashy UIs could exist. Porcelain isn't all trivial either - consider "git rebase"! NixOS today is like early Git.. usable and powerful, but not user-friendly. It needs a good UI, a graphical installer, and high-level porcelain to hide the plumbing unless you need to drop into it. As for the cattle question, I think Nix's real power will come from efficient, declarative "Dockerfiles" and serving as a Bazel-like build system. There was a project for this, Hocker, but it seems inactive.
- hardwaresofton 8y ago
  > NixOS today is like early Git.. usable and powerful, but not user-friendly. It needs a good UI, a graphical installer, and high-level porcelain to hide the plumbing unless you need to drop into it. I'm not sure even that's enough, Nix is trying to win the lottery 3 times -- pushing a (essentially universal) package manager, a programming language, and linux distribution into the mainstream at the same time. What you noted might solve package management, but I'm convinced no one actually knows just how to make programming languages/OSes popular enough to hit and stay in the mainstream, outside of lots of money for marketing or serendipity. All this said... Nix (OS + package manager) is definitely on my list of things to take for a spin -- I watch and read stuff about it but haven't taken the plunge just yet. It's very popular in the Haskell Ecosystem [0]. [0]: http://www.tpflug.me/2019/01/14/haskell-nix-vim/ http://www.tpflug.me/2019/01/14/haskell-nix-vim/
  - mbrock 8y ago
    NixOS seems in some way to have more momentum for curious hackers than any other GNU/Linux distro; people who get into it really get into it. I myself consciously try not to be evangelical about it, still many of my friends and acquaintances end up installing it because it’s just so damn cool.
  - akavel 8y ago
    Interestingly, historically, at first there was only Nix the package manager + language. The NixOS distribution came to be purely as a subsequent experiment, a bright idea by a single another person (AFAIK), kinda "what if?..." Which then became a runaway success (relatively speaking — not mainstream yet), with more and more people realizing the potential and the benefits. Moreover, in fact the original Nix was also a one-person experiment, a PhD thesis by Eelco Dolstra. I believe there's not that much "pushing" anything, rather the ideas being just inherently awesome and breakthrough, and many people quickly realizing this notion after being exposed to them :)

sterlind 8y ago

NixOS fangirl here... you're totally right about usability! Git was self-hosting from day 3, but consisted only of a few pieces of exposed plumbing. As more porcelain was bolted on, it got to the point where flashy UIs could exist. Porcelain isn't all trivial either - consider "git rebase"! NixOS today is like early Git.. usable and powerful, but not user-friendly. It needs a good UI, a graphical installer, and high-level porcelain to hide the plumbing unless you need to drop into it. As for the cattle question, I think Nix's real power will come from efficient, declarative "Dockerfiles" and serving as a Bazel-like build system. There was a project for this, Hocker, but it seems inactive.

hardwaresofton 8y ago
> NixOS today is like early Git.. usable and powerful, but not user-friendly. It needs a good UI, a graphical installer, and high-level porcelain to hide the plumbing unless you need to drop into it. I'm not sure even that's enough, Nix is trying to win the lottery 3 times -- pushing a (essentially universal) package manager, a programming language, and linux distribution into the mainstream at the same time. What you noted might solve package management, but I'm convinced no one actually knows just how to make programming languages/OSes popular enough to hit and stay in the mainstream, outside of lots of money for marketing or serendipity. All this said... Nix (OS + package manager) is definitely on my list of things to take for a spin -- I watch and read stuff about it but haven't taken the plunge just yet. It's very popular in the Haskell Ecosystem [0]. [0]: http://www.tpflug.me/2019/01/14/haskell-nix-vim/ http://www.tpflug.me/2019/01/14/haskell-nix-vim/
- mbrock 8y ago
  NixOS seems in some way to have more momentum for curious hackers than any other GNU/Linux distro; people who get into it really get into it. I myself consciously try not to be evangelical about it, still many of my friends and acquaintances end up installing it because it’s just so damn cool.
- akavel 8y ago
  Interestingly, historically, at first there was only Nix the package manager + language. The NixOS distribution came to be purely as a subsequent experiment, a bright idea by a single another person (AFAIK), kinda "what if?..." Which then became a runaway success (relatively speaking — not mainstream yet), with more and more people realizing the potential and the benefits. Moreover, in fact the original Nix was also a one-person experiment, a PhD thesis by Eelco Dolstra. I believe there's not that much "pushing" anything, rather the ideas being just inherently awesome and breakthrough, and many people quickly realizing this notion after being exposed to them :)