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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 po

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 :)
corysama 8y ago
NixOS lightweight but fanboy here. I really rooting for both Nix and Guix to get more attention. They are suffering from usability problems because of they lack of attention so far. But, the power they grant to make major system changes with low risk is so damn good... It seems a tragedy that market inertia is putting billions into portable snapshots while ignoring provably bit-accurate, experimentable configuration.
Nullabillity 8y ago
> There was a project for this, Hocker, but it seems inactive. Nixpkgs' dockerTools.buildLayeredImage can build Docker images from your Nix packages. There's also pullImage and buildImage which combine to let you use regular Docker base images, but frankly that seems pretty pointless.

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 :)

corysama 8y ago

NixOS lightweight but fanboy here. I really rooting for both Nix and Guix to get more attention. They are suffering from usability problems because of they lack of attention so far. But, the power they grant to make major system changes with low risk is so damn good... It seems a tragedy that market inertia is putting billions into portable snapshots while ignoring provably bit-accurate, experimentable configuration.

Nullabillity 8y ago

> There was a project for this, Hocker, but it seems inactive. Nixpkgs' dockerTools.buildLayeredImage can build Docker images from your Nix packages. There's also pullImage and buildImage which combine to let you use regular Docker base images, but frankly that seems pretty pointless.