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> A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. I don't have any doubts about the likes of Nix or even other attempts at improving the reproduci

> A lot of odd Nix hate in here, or at least extreme dislike. I don't have any doubts about the likes of Nix or even other attempts at improving the reproducibility of building and installing packages being technically superior to what we have now in some ways. But at the same time, you can't forget about people and in some ways the industry taking the path of least resistance whenever possible. You want to introduce a good but somewhat complicated way to manage packages? People will simply use "apt" while its UI/UX/DX is easy to get a hang of. People get sick of differences between environments and how hard it is to deal with everything from resource constraints, port binding, configuration management, persistent data handling etc. in *nix? Many of them will turn to shipping VMs, tools like Vagrant or more recently - Docker. Thus, it stands to reason that for any tool to become popular amongst the "common folk", not just brave early adopters or very technically able people, the tool needs to be easy to use. I guess that's also why i'd say that more people use Linux distros (GNU or otherwise) as opposed to something like the *BSD OSes, even if those also have some notable benefits in regards to stability, networking performance, in-tree development etc.

easygenes 5y ago
Yeah, good points. Nix has been as-yet very pointedly a developer-centric ecosystem. And not just that, but developer-centric for people who favor functional programming in general. There's some work especially in the last few years to make it all more approachable, but that's the background. Wait a couple more years and you will see more projects like Nix GUI here start to mature and then it will get very interesting beyond people who have backgrounds in, e.g. distributed computing and Haskell.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. If you like every 6 months (or merely every job change!) fuck with APT, your bashrc, etc. with a little stack overflowing during onboarding, whatever. It's too rare to be worth optimizing; I get it. If you switch projects every 2 weeks, the calculus changes greatly. I do work at one of them now, but I got into Nix as a student hobbyist, when I was also rotating through homework assignments and personal projects quickly.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector. Though maybe the industry here is lagging behind trends - only in the past 3 years or so Docker has started gaining a foothold and even large corporations are just figuring out how to run their own Kubernetes clusters and Docker Swarm is still in use in some places, or even just Docker Compose. Then again, some of these projects don't even have systemd services in place to ensure that they can be controlled easily, so who knows... Manually launching Tomcat or GlassFish instances never inspires confidence.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    > I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector. Hah! Nix is super European, and from my American vantage point the more west you go, the fewer Nix users there are! I first learned of the whole Eastern Europe consulting phenomenon via the Nix community too.

easygenes 5y ago

Yeah, good points. Nix has been as-yet very pointedly a developer-centric ecosystem. And not just that, but developer-centric for people who favor functional programming in general. There's some work especially in the last few years to make it all more approachable, but that's the background. Wait a couple more years and you will see more projects like Nix GUI here start to mature and then it will get very interesting beyond people who have backgrounds in, e.g. distributed computing and Haskell.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. If you like every 6 months (or merely every job change!) fuck with APT, your bashrc, etc. with a little stack overflowing during onboarding, whatever. It's too rare to be worth optimizing; I get it. If you switch projects every 2 weeks, the calculus changes greatly. I do work at one of them now, but I got into Nix as a student hobbyist, when I was also rotating through homework assignments and personal projects quickly.

KronisLV 5y ago
> Nix is common among consultancies because the more switching between projects you do, the more it pays off. I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector. Though maybe the industry here is lagging behind trends - only in the past 3 years or so Docker has started gaining a foothold and even large corporations are just figuring out how to run their own Kubernetes clusters and Docker Swarm is still in use in some places, or even just Docker Compose. Then again, some of these projects don't even have systemd services in place to ensure that they can be controlled easily, so who knows... Manually launching Tomcat or GlassFish instances never inspires confidence.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > I feel like this is perhaps situational? I am yet to see Nix be used once in about 5 years of development in many projects in Eastern Europe, both governmental in private sector. Hah! Nix is super European, and from my American vantage point the more west you go, the fewer Nix users there are! I first learned of the whole Eastern Europe consulting phenomenon via the Nix community too.