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As someone who has never used Nix, from first glance the question I ask myself is... why?
by dimgl 5y ago
As someone who has never used Nix, from first glance the question I ask myself is... why?
- rgoulter 5y agoNix is difficult, but there are advantages to it. A couple of comparisons are similar: with Terraform (or CloudFormation etc.), you put in a lot of effort up front in order to reduce maintenance effort later. You could manually go through and setup a VM instance or two; but with Terraform, you have a declaration in code of what the system should be. I think another comparison is: Vim or Emacs are more difficult to use compared to using VSCode. In terms of DX, there are advantages to Emacs over VSCode. If modal editing seems to make sense, it's probably worth looking at vim. But, if you just want to get the job done right now and not fuss about learning an unfamiliar tool, VSCode is surely a better choice.
- pxc 5y agoNix - is fast (faster than Homebrew or Docker) - is multi-user (don't need root privileges to install software) - lets you try software without permanently installing it - gives you fast, reliable undo without requiring a special filesystem - lets you automatically (re)produce a setup that never drifts from its official definition - can safely perform upgrades and configuration changes without thinking about what has been done to the system or environment in the past - has tons and tons of software already packaged for it at this point, which you can just use without any special effort