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For the use case of developer machines, NixOS is much more friction compared to other OSs. It's not about how nice Nix stuff is when it works. It's about how mu

For the use case of developer machines, NixOS is much more friction compared to other OSs. It's not about how nice Nix stuff is when it works. It's about how much of a pain it is to get things working when things aren't nice and you don't know what to do. With other popular distributions, you can rely on being able to find a StackOverflow answer with whatever your error message is. Most other OSs and package managers are malleable enough that you can easily beat them into shape should anything go wrong. It's also usually easy enough to adapt how things are done in one Linux distribution to another, but Nix is weird and takes a long time to figure out. (Nix stuff itself being expressive enough that there's often more than one way to do things).

gugagore 5y ago
> It's about how much of a pain it is to get things working when things aren't nice and you don't know what to do. Thank you for highlighting this. I love elegance, safety, reproducibility, declarative specifications, etc. But the minute I get the sense of "this philosophy is getting in the way. I am stuck, even though I know exactly what to do below this layer of abstraction", I get very annoyed. That's why I asked about "escape hatches" in a sibling comment.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Worst case just run chroots, or docker for the rare case something really don’t want to run under Nix. But it rarely happens anymore, it has a huge ecosystem with almost everything packaged so depending on how niche is the thing you work on, it can be a really comfortable environment.
toastal 5y ago
There would be less friction if say NPM and package managers like these weren't installing files in random places, assuming locations of files/binaries instead of querying, let libraries and binaries be configurable, and/or not following the XDG spec. This is probably what developers should be doing, but many can't be asked to understand Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distro.

gugagore 5y ago

> It's about how much of a pain it is to get things working when things aren't nice and you don't know what to do. Thank you for highlighting this. I love elegance, safety, reproducibility, declarative specifications, etc. But the minute I get the sense of "this philosophy is getting in the way. I am stuck, even though I know exactly what to do below this layer of abstraction", I get very annoyed. That's why I asked about "escape hatches" in a sibling comment.

kaba0 5y ago
Worst case just run chroots, or docker for the rare case something really don’t want to run under Nix. But it rarely happens anymore, it has a huge ecosystem with almost everything packaged so depending on how niche is the thing you work on, it can be a really comfortable environment.

toastal 5y ago

There would be less friction if say NPM and package managers like these weren't installing files in random places, assuming locations of files/binaries instead of querying, let libraries and binaries be configurable, and/or not following the XDG spec. This is probably what developers should be doing, but many can't be asked to understand Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distro.