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I think it's really important to have realistic expectations about Nix/NixOS when deciding how much effort to spend on it. It's ridiculously hard to get starte

I think it's really important to have realistic expectations about Nix/NixOS when deciding how much effort to spend on it. It's ridiculously hard to get started. The online resources are simply inadequate: incorrect and/or out-of-date information is basically equally common as useful information. There isn't a good book you can get on Amazon. The "Learn" boards thing is full of "you're doing it wrong" bullshit. The Discord is so-so at best for getting help. For me personally it was somewhere between 1-3 months of being frustrated basically every day and I still want to throw things sometimes. It's basically clone `nixpkgs`, figure out how to get the REPL going, painstakingly reading the code of the stuff that does work, and pain. It says absolutely nothing about how smart/capable/motivated/senior someone is that a week or two in it's like "fuck this". The payoff is outrageous, but the barrier to entry is nowhere near something that can be called "acceptable", let alone "batteries included". I completely understand why a lot of people are all-but-hostile to it. I would budget a minimum of a highly frustrating month working with it every day to start to having the lightbulb moments, and frankly your use case needs to be pretty extreme in one way or another for that to be worth it. A lot of people don't have a friggin month to screw around with a fairly niche infrastructure if what they're doing now works for them. I really, really hope that at some point someone gets serious about making this fairly magical thing even remotely learnable, but right now it's a fucking mess.

nixpulvis 5y ago
I think this comment applies to nearly all technology today. If it doesn't have a `man` page, good `-h` notes, or a manual released with each version, I basically assume I'm going to have a hellish time Googling around for anything. This doesn't really solve the issue though, since a lot of manuals written are outdated by sources changes that were rushed and forgotten. We need to come to terms with the fact that the way we as programmers acquire information about our tools is in a dire need of help. Search indices are just not valid references for us. We should never have learned this method of learning in the first place, but it was easy and painless in the beginning. People need to just slow down a bit and become more methodical one thinks.
- benreesman 5y ago
  Not to disagree with anything you said. I will remark that for some things (Python comes to mind as just one example) StackOverflow is really useful. I think if there were a vibrant StackOverflow community around Nix it would go a very long way to making it more usable.
  - clem 5y ago
    Even with StackOverflow, try finding the current canonical means of building Python applications and deploying artifacts. It's a maelstrom of outdated advice.
takeda 5y ago
> I really, really hope that at some point someone gets serious about making this fairly magical thing even remotely learnable, but right now it's a fucking mess. That's because all the ways you learned how to do things on linux you need to throw out of window and start from scratch.

nixpulvis 5y ago

I think this comment applies to nearly all technology today. If it doesn't have a `man` page, good `-h` notes, or a manual released with each version, I basically assume I'm going to have a hellish time Googling around for anything. This doesn't really solve the issue though, since a lot of manuals written are outdated by sources changes that were rushed and forgotten. We need to come to terms with the fact that the way we as programmers acquire information about our tools is in a dire need of help. Search indices are just not valid references for us. We should never have learned this method of learning in the first place, but it was easy and painless in the beginning. People need to just slow down a bit and become more methodical one thinks.

benreesman 5y ago
Not to disagree with anything you said. I will remark that for some things (Python comes to mind as just one example) StackOverflow is really useful. I think if there were a vibrant StackOverflow community around Nix it would go a very long way to making it more usable.
- clem 5y ago
  Even with StackOverflow, try finding the current canonical means of building Python applications and deploying artifacts. It's a maelstrom of outdated advice.

takeda 5y ago

> I really, really hope that at some point someone gets serious about making this fairly magical thing even remotely learnable, but right now it's a fucking mess. That's because all the ways you learned how to do things on linux you need to throw out of window and start from scratch.