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Nix and NixOS has an incredible number of features and use-cases that have almost no documentation around. The only way to discover those, it seems to me, is to
by yewenjie 4y ago
Nix and NixOS has an incredible number of features and use-cases that have almost no documentation around. The only way to discover those, it seems to me, is to look up people's nixos configurations on GitHub etc.
Beginner level blogposts (that are plenty) talk about the same few features like ad-hoc development shell.
- e3bc54b2 4y agoYou are right of course. NixOS ain't for the faint of heart. OTOH it finally got me over my fear of being a n00b and just use the source.
- spindle 4y agoNixOS for busy developers ain't for the faint of heart. But I am extremely faint of heart, and I love NixOS. The trick is that I'm not a developer, and I happen not to need to ask it to do anything complicated or non-standard. I expect lots of other people are in my position (although maybe not many of those people read HN).
- nirimda 4y agoThe problem is that this isn't a feature that it supports, it's just that someone noticed the way you can combine the existing features leads to this possibility. It's the same with a programming language - until someone noticed that you could use javascript and web browsers to make a PDF viewer or an email client, maybe there was no documentation about how to do that. I think it's not so much a problem of Nix/NixOS, but a consequence of the power of composability. For the next n years, people will keep discovering new things you can do. As the knowledge spreads, people will work out how to document the features and present them in ways that can be easily grasped. But the final success of NixOS will be when every distribution adopts more and more NixOS-like composability and NixOS is well understood and even boring, like the final success of Unix.