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Nix makes my dev life on MacOS so much more manageable. The "dirty" feeling has, for the most part, gone away. I'm also able to easily share common config betwe

by dlyons 4y ago

Nix makes my dev life on MacOS so much more manageable. The "dirty" feeling has, for the most part, gone away. I'm also able to easily share common config between other machines I use. Here's my Nix setup for my M1 Macbook using nix-darwin, if it helps anyone: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config

kitsunesoba 4y ago
It’s been a long time since I’ve played with Nix, do you still need to maintain a nixfile or whatever? Maybe I just wasn’t “holding it right” but I recall not being able to just pop open a terminal window and do “X install Y” like with traditional package managers which was a turnoff.
smoldesu 4y ago
I've got something very similar! https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/tree/main/nix https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/tree/main/nix It's also interesting to hear comments from the Nix detractors here. There's ample room to criticize the language and even the design philosophy behind the package manager, but it's a shame that most people never give it a "proper shot". Maybe that's the fault of Nix maintainers though.
- oneplane 4y ago
  Lots of people can't "give it a shot" because it is so different from everything else. That's also why it has no foothold in any corporate environment. Even the amount of small businesses that use Nix for development is so small it's insignificant (but is exists). The main issue (I think) is that it boils down to "a worse shell script" shaped in a LISP kind of wrapper. Plenty of people know about LISP too but will simply not even look at it because it is too different. Even if you take away the functional paradigm it just doesn't look like anything that can map to an existing knowledge base. This is also why C-esque languages (and I'm talking about the non-edge-cases here) are so prevalent and successful; they don't have to be 'the best' or even 'good', they just have to be easy to map to existing knowledge to be useful. And Nix doesn't do that.

by dlyons 4y ago

kitsunesoba 4y ago

It’s been a long time since I’ve played with Nix, do you still need to maintain a nixfile or whatever? Maybe I just wasn’t “holding it right” but I recall not being able to just pop open a terminal window and do “X install Y” like with traditional package managers which was a turnoff.

smoldesu 4y ago

I've got something very similar! https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/tree/main/nix https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/tree/main/nix It's also interesting to hear comments from the Nix detractors here. There's ample room to criticize the language and even the design philosophy behind the package manager, but it's a shame that most people never give it a "proper shot". Maybe that's the fault of Nix maintainers though.

oneplane 4y ago
Lots of people can't "give it a shot" because it is so different from everything else. That's also why it has no foothold in any corporate environment. Even the amount of small businesses that use Nix for development is so small it's insignificant (but is exists). The main issue (I think) is that it boils down to "a worse shell script" shaped in a LISP kind of wrapper. Plenty of people know about LISP too but will simply not even look at it because it is too different. Even if you take away the functional paradigm it just doesn't look like anything that can map to an existing knowledge base. This is also why C-esque languages (and I'm talking about the non-edge-cases here) are so prevalent and successful; they don't have to be 'the best' or even 'good', they just have to be easy to map to existing knowledge to be useful. And Nix doesn't do that.