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It's not just you, the user experience of nix is terrible. It's biggest feature of "pure" builds is mostly unnecessary given the complexity. It's runner up feat

It's not just you, the user experience of nix is terrible. It's biggest feature of "pure" builds is mostly unnecessary given the complexity. It's runner up feature of configuring builds with a few scripts can also easily be accomplished by simpler tooling... I don't get why it's necessary or unfortunately why it is so complicated... Anything that can be done in nix can be done in a tenth the time by any employee in a more commonly used technology. In industry, this is a very bad thing in my opinion

benreesman 4y ago
The user experience of Nix is terrible. I’m not sure that it’s even fixable. But Nix or something like it is going to take over the world. Dynamic linking by default is absurdly stupid and mostly motivated by GNU politics. It’s a terrible problem. Many (most?) of the users of Docker don’t even realize that this is the problem Docker is solving for them. But they know they have a terrible problem and Docker helps a lot. Nix is Docker on steroids. It’s Docker that got bitten by a radioactive spider. Linux namespaces and cgroups and BSD jails have been around. Docker made it Just Work. When someone does that for Nix, which is basically Docker done by computer scientists, it’s game over for anything else.
- lillecarl 4y ago
  You can use Nix to build OCI(images) and run them on Kubernetes if you want to. Nix is a souped up package manager, Docker is a container runtime. Nix depends on packages existing in /nix Docker chroots into a "folder" and runs a command(+many more things). Lets not mix technologies up for the readers too much.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    I’m well aware that Nix can produce container images. Xe has a great post about it. People use Docker for a lot of reasons, but mostly? Same Dockerfile, same outcome, mostly every time. No one is moving /usr/lib/x86_64 around under you. It’s a real sea change, on the order of revision control: we hadn’t even realized that we were living with constant low-level anxiety that someone was going to break our computing environment at any moment. “sudo apt upgrade —whatever”, eh, maybe next week, we’ve got a release coming up. Calling Nix a souped up package manager is like technically correct maybe? It’s ‘git reset —hard HEAD^’ for your whole computer or fleet of computers. It’s utterly fearless experimentation, it’s low/zero runtime cost isolation and reproducibility. It’s early days ‘git’ for systems: pain in the ass to learn and use, frequently and credibly accused of being too hard for mortals, but profoundly game changing. Whether Nix per se remains the plumbing, someone is going to do good porcelain and end DevOps as a specialization, along with Docker and Canonical and mandatory glibc nonsense and a thousand other things that have overstayed their welcome. Disks are big now, we can have a big directory full of hashes. We can afford the good life. It’s going to be a big deal.
    - lillecarl 4y ago
      In the more philosophical sense I think you're right. I've been using NixOS for 2 years now on all my machines* but I still don't know the language. I use it as a stable base system, but when I need to do something that I'm unable to do with Nix I still drop into a $DISTRO container and do my work there where everything is stateful and "disgusting". Having worked with DevOps for awhile I can happily tell you that we don't run around building Docker containers all days, at least in my team the developers do so. We provide them with a base to build upon, provide CI and stateful services like databases and storage. I spend an awful lot of time writing Terraform and Helm charts though, since things needs to run somewhere. But yes, the immutable nature of Nix is great. Nix was VERY helpful for me when I switched GPU's from NVIDIA to AMD on my desktop, no screen? Reboot, reconfigure, retry. But yes, I agree. Something that resembles Nix will take over the computing world, as someone said somewhere in the comments of this post. The great thing about Nix is that when you fix something it stays fixed. Even if it was a PITA to get there.
      - benreesman 4y ago
        I believe that we’re in violent agreement :) I used the exact same words “things stay fixed” elsewhere in the thread. Which is big psychologically. I’ll do some really difficult or even painful things in good humor if I get a lasting benefit. But if someone or something is just going to yank the rug underneath me next month? Fuck it, hack up some doofy shell script and call it a day. Nix aligns the incentives on getting things right. I’m happy to learn the arcana of some weird corner case of some tool or service if I can apply that in a way that is permanent. Now we just need someone to unfuck the UX nightmare :P
    - CMCDragonkai 4y ago
      Nix is a programming language/system for software packaging. Along the way, it turns out OS configuration is also just packaging... As long as you don't have anything too dynamic. It is the most sophisticated programming language/system for software packaging on the market today. We use it for all our reproducible software development environments. All of our project templates. And all of our employees are issued NixOS configurations so everybody on the team has the same NixOS, the same Nix package overlay... Etc. This level of consistency ensures that we get a level of reproducibility from hardware to OS to user profile to development environment to CI/CD that just doesn't exist anywhere else atm. It's not entirely perfect but that's not really Nix's fault. It's actually the fault of the rest of the software industry that persists with bad tech. All of Nix's complexity stems from having to package everybody else's mess. Anyway one day I hope the CI/CD systems in the world will just provide Nix jobs directly instead of proxying through a docker container image that I have to setup atm.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I don’t think mixing up the two was parent’s point at all. He/she just made an analogy of where Nix currently is vs where should it go to “take over the world”.

benreesman 4y ago

The user experience of Nix is terrible. I’m not sure that it’s even fixable. But Nix or something like it is going to take over the world. Dynamic linking by default is absurdly stupid and mostly motivated by GNU politics. It’s a terrible problem. Many (most?) of the users of Docker don’t even realize that this is the problem Docker is solving for them. But they know they have a terrible problem and Docker helps a lot. Nix is Docker on steroids. It’s Docker that got bitten by a radioactive spider. Linux namespaces and cgroups and BSD jails have been around. Docker made it Just Work. When someone does that for Nix, which is basically Docker done by computer scientists, it’s game over for anything else.

lillecarl 4y ago
You can use Nix to build OCI(images) and run them on Kubernetes if you want to. Nix is a souped up package manager, Docker is a container runtime. Nix depends on packages existing in /nix Docker chroots into a "folder" and runs a command(+many more things). Lets not mix technologies up for the readers too much.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I’m well aware that Nix can produce container images. Xe has a great post about it. People use Docker for a lot of reasons, but mostly? Same Dockerfile, same outcome, mostly every time. No one is moving /usr/lib/x86_64 around under you. It’s a real sea change, on the order of revision control: we hadn’t even realized that we were living with constant low-level anxiety that someone was going to break our computing environment at any moment. “sudo apt upgrade —whatever”, eh, maybe next week, we’ve got a release coming up. Calling Nix a souped up package manager is like technically correct maybe? It’s ‘git reset —hard HEAD^’ for your whole computer or fleet of computers. It’s utterly fearless experimentation, it’s low/zero runtime cost isolation and reproducibility. It’s early days ‘git’ for systems: pain in the ass to learn and use, frequently and credibly accused of being too hard for mortals, but profoundly game changing. Whether Nix per se remains the plumbing, someone is going to do good porcelain and end DevOps as a specialization, along with Docker and Canonical and mandatory glibc nonsense and a thousand other things that have overstayed their welcome. Disks are big now, we can have a big directory full of hashes. We can afford the good life. It’s going to be a big deal.
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    In the more philosophical sense I think you're right. I've been using NixOS for 2 years now on all my machines* but I still don't know the language. I use it as a stable base system, but when I need to do something that I'm unable to do with Nix I still drop into a $DISTRO container and do my work there where everything is stateful and "disgusting". Having worked with DevOps for awhile I can happily tell you that we don't run around building Docker containers all days, at least in my team the developers do so. We provide them with a base to build upon, provide CI and stateful services like databases and storage. I spend an awful lot of time writing Terraform and Helm charts though, since things needs to run somewhere. But yes, the immutable nature of Nix is great. Nix was VERY helpful for me when I switched GPU's from NVIDIA to AMD on my desktop, no screen? Reboot, reconfigure, retry. But yes, I agree. Something that resembles Nix will take over the computing world, as someone said somewhere in the comments of this post. The great thing about Nix is that when you fix something it stays fixed. Even if it was a PITA to get there.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      I believe that we’re in violent agreement :) I used the exact same words “things stay fixed” elsewhere in the thread. Which is big psychologically. I’ll do some really difficult or even painful things in good humor if I get a lasting benefit. But if someone or something is just going to yank the rug underneath me next month? Fuck it, hack up some doofy shell script and call it a day. Nix aligns the incentives on getting things right. I’m happy to learn the arcana of some weird corner case of some tool or service if I can apply that in a way that is permanent. Now we just need someone to unfuck the UX nightmare :P
  - CMCDragonkai 4y ago
    Nix is a programming language/system for software packaging. Along the way, it turns out OS configuration is also just packaging... As long as you don't have anything too dynamic. It is the most sophisticated programming language/system for software packaging on the market today. We use it for all our reproducible software development environments. All of our project templates. And all of our employees are issued NixOS configurations so everybody on the team has the same NixOS, the same Nix package overlay... Etc. This level of consistency ensures that we get a level of reproducibility from hardware to OS to user profile to development environment to CI/CD that just doesn't exist anywhere else atm. It's not entirely perfect but that's not really Nix's fault. It's actually the fault of the rest of the software industry that persists with bad tech. All of Nix's complexity stems from having to package everybody else's mess. Anyway one day I hope the CI/CD systems in the world will just provide Nix jobs directly instead of proxying through a docker container image that I have to setup atm.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t think mixing up the two was parent’s point at all. He/she just made an analogy of where Nix currently is vs where should it go to “take over the world”.