11 ms·

Nix and NixOS, my pain points

137 points by Reventlov 4y ago

tsuujin 4y ago
I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don’t think I could really recommend to any of my peers. It’s too bad guix went full hardcore FOSS and refuses to support macs, because they seem to have better docs and using a language that I can use outside of my package manager makes a lot more sense to me.
- 40yearoldman 4y ago
  I keep reading, this, and keeping being told this. Yet I switched every system over to nix and have found no thing but the best examples documentation and help from nix to do so. Within the span of a afternoon and a bit a reading I went from zero, to a script that lets me setup an entire dev systems with just a few commands in a vm, and or even on hardware. If anything the Nix documentation is just as good as every other thing out there. What is different is there are more than one way to do many things in Nix. This to me I think is the core of complaints. Its a language, and thus the language has may expressions that result in the same outcome. The second bit I think people struggle with is it is functional. If you look at Nix complaints they appear to nearly be identical to that of Haskell.
  - CapsAdmin 4y ago
    I also didn't notice that the documentation was especially bad. I'm thinking maybe it makes more sense for some programmers?
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    Then you are a superhuman. I too went through weeks of pain and suffering to get my nixos hypervisor running, and if I were to lose my script and have to start from scratch again, I'd just install Debian instead. I would never recommend nixos to anyone. The concept is awesome, but the execution is terrible.
    - prox 4y ago
      What I often find is this “ought to know” treshold. Parent comment user is probably familiar with lingo you are not. Documentation often assumes a certain level and a writer does not imagine a less capable user.
      - pxc 4y ago
        Yes, the Nix community has great reference docs for people who already know how things work, for most things imo. At the same time, it isn't always obvious enough where to find a good introduction to terms and concepts used. But materials of that kind are increasingly available and general gaps are being filled with a lot of focus lately.
  - laserlight 4y ago
    By documentation, I believe people mean tutorials. At least, lack of tutorials is my complaint. I've read all introductory material. I want to build a customized version of emacs on nix, yet I have no idea how to do it or where to start.
    - scoopertrooper 4y ago
      Why use a tutorial when ChatGPT has you covered? > How do I create a nix package that clones eMacs from GitHub and builds it from source? { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, fetchFromGitHub }: let emacsSrc = fetchFromGitHub { owner = "emacs-mirror"; repo = "emacs"; rev = "master"; sha256 = "0xabcd1234"; }; in pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "emacs"; version = "27.1"; src = emacsSrc; buildInputs = [ pkgs.autoconf pkgs.make ]; configurePhase = '' autoconf ./configure --prefix=$out ''; buildPhase = "make"; installPhase = "make install"; }
      - delroth 4y ago
        As usual for ChatGPT this is full of mistakes and bad code. The buildPhase and installPhase it writes are completely unnecessary and worse than the default, the configurePhase might work in some cases but most likely won't, and it's unnecessary when instead autoreconfHook should be used, stdenv/autoconf should be taken as an argument for the function returning the derivation, autoconf should be a nativeBuildInput, make is already in stdenv, etc.
        toastal 4y ago
        You're also supposed to call the pre and post hooks for these phases.
        Rexogamer 4y ago
        More fundamentally, even if the code produced by ChatGPT worked and was high-quality, why should a new user have to rely on a chatbot instead of useful/up-to-date tutorials and guides?
      - 4y ago
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > It's a language, and thus the language has may expressions that result in the same outcome. First it's a distribution and a package manager, and the guidance regarding these is sub-par. Especially with what there is of documentation being split between the old and new UIs, then being told about flakes but that they're experimental so it's not clear whether you should or should not use them. I just went to the nix website, clicked "first steps with nix" and I get https://nixos.org/guides/ad-hoc-developer-environments.html https://nixos.org/guides/ad-hoc-developer-environments.html Is that useful? I'm sure to somebody who already knows what they want out of nix it is, but the first thing I'm told is that shell environments exist and are useful to "use the tool without having to install the software.". Ok, but what if I want to install the software? Then there's listing of what's essentially a magical invocation out of nowhere: $ nix-shell -p 'python38.withPackages (packages: [ packages.django ])' I can understand that (or at least reach what I assume is an understanding), but there's no real explanation to give me knowledge to expand upon, if anything the explanations are worse than useless: > We create an ad hoc environment with $PYTHONPATH set and python available, along with the django package. thank you very much, that confirms I'd about interpreted the line correctly, but you've not told me what `withPackages` is or where `packages.django` comes out of so I'm not really helped. And apparently the next step is "declarative and reproducible developer environments", or possibly "towards reproducibility: pinning Nixpkgs"? Or even better, "To quickly setup a Nix project read through Getting started Nix template", I have no clue what a nix project is or why I'd want one. There's not just a step missing here, there's an entire floor, possibly building. It's like the nix community saw how git is taught and went "we can do worse".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - soraminazuki 4y ago
      > Is that useful? I'm sure to somebody who already knows what they want out of nix it is, but the first thing I'm told is that shell environments exist and are useful to "use the tool without having to install the software.". Ok, but what if I want to install the software? Why would you go to https://nixos.org/learn.html https://nixos.org/learn.html, click on an introductory example titled "Ad-hoc developer environments" and complain that it doesn't explain how to permanently install software? > but there's no real explanation to give me knowledge to expand upon Again, you're pointing to a page containing TLDR examples. That's not the right place for an in-depth explanation. > There's not just a step missing here, there's an entire floor, possibly building. It's like the nix community saw how git is taught and went "we can do worse". No surprise because you missed the entire manual.
  - soraminazuki 4y ago
    Nix actually has far better than average documentation compared to other typical open source projects. I started using Nix years ago on Ubuntu to quickly install a package that wasn't present in Ubuntu's repository. Eventually, I began customizing packages using Nix expressions. Before I knew it, I migrated my existing systems over to NixOS. What I can say is it wasn't at all the uphill struggle that's associated with Nix in online discussions. Even though the documentation isn't perfect and going through active improvements, there's a considerable gap between Nix's reputation regarding documentation and my own actual experience. What surprises me is that people tout RPM/Chef as easier replacements to Nix/NixOS. The assumption about those being "replacements" of each other is questionable because they address different needs. What's even more questionable is the part about RPM or Chef being easy. I have dealt with those two for years as part of my day job, and they're both far from easy. I still have troubles with them to this day. Documentation is far more lacking than Nix, and it's not because things are obvious. If you encounter any trouble, you almost always have to dive into the source code. Navigating the source code of RPM or Chef is a nightmare because the code is scattered across countless different repositories and it's impossible to guess where to look for to begin with. Choice of programming languages doen't help here too. Chef is written in Ruby, which has a tendency of making code ungreppable due to its metaprogramming features. RPM has its own macro syntax which works similar to the C preprocessor. It's very terse and full of gotchas. Navigating around Nix code is much, much easier in comparison. Everything you need is in a single repo, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs, and written in a JSON-like language. Many people also claim that Nix is hard because it requires a functional programming background. That too doesn't match my experience. Nix expressions are basically JSON with functions. Learning the syntax is a non-issue if you know JSON and some common programming language constructs like conditionals, functions, map, filter and reduce. The only functional programming exposure I had prior to Nix was LISP, in a university classroom. Yet I didn't experience problems learning the syntax. The hard part is learning how to actually utilize the language. The documentation and some grepping around of the Nixpkgs codebase helped a lot with this.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    My complaint is chiefly about practical implementation. “I want to use nix as a package manager across systems” is far too difficult for a new user. One document tells you to flakes, another tells you that it’s experimental and should be avoided. One document tells you that you should use Darwin modules and home manager, and then completely omits the fact that the linked home manager scripts don’t work with Darwin by design leading to “why the fuck isn’t this file they tell me should be auto generated not being created”. Because the official docs don’t seem to cover real world use cases, you end up relying on a labyrinth of out of date and conflicting user contributed tutorials and it is very frustrating. Once you know what to do nix is simple enough, but learning what to do is outright painful; if you don’t believe me look to the other replies to my comment.
- Reventlov 4y ago
  I agree with the Guix bit. At some point, I tried using Guix System on my laptop (with wireless support), and of course I was greeted with « use a wifi card that respect your freedom » or something of the sort. At some point, I might try again, using NonGuix ( https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix ), but right now I'm not using Guix SD. Instead, I try to use Guix on small projects (like building websites using pelican), without going full Guix. What I'm most impressed with Guix is the time machine and Software Heritage integration, but it still needs a lot of improvement for developers, for example allowing to specify environment variables in manifest.scm files.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    Nonguix is new to me. I may give it a look at some point but I’m already over the pain threshold on nix. Any idea if nonguix will allow an install on macOS? I really want a system like this that I can use on my work MacBook and remote Linux servers.
  - sierkov 4y ago
    > for example allowing to specify environment variables in manifest.scm files. There is already .envrc or .dir-locals.el? And manifest is just - well - manifest. By definition it has to be 'plain'. I mean, there are already a million ways to load env vars so why'd you want guix to do that too and from manifest.scm of all places?
    - Reventlov 4y ago
      Because instead of distributing two files (channels.scm and manifest.scm, or flake.lock and flake.nix), you have to execute monstruosities like `guix shell --container -m ./manifest.scm -- bash -c 'GUIX_LOCPATH=$GUIX_ENVIRONMENT/lib/locale LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf-8 exec jekyll build'`, which is how I build some websites I have. To me, that's not ok from an user experience point of view.
      - sierkov 4y ago
        Exactly my point. You can already do it with direnv, have guix shell once you cd into dir and then just do `jekyll build`.
- bollos 4y ago
  This sadly also sums up my short-lived stay with NixOS. Tried on multiple occasions to get a working system to no avail and ultimately made me go back to Fedora where I remain until this day.
- prox 4y ago
  It’s typical of certain areas in tech (like here) to not document, to not care about up to date information, and only as a last resort. You need people who can manage that and create a culture of documenting.
- abathur 4y ago
  I have been starting to suspect that a big part of the gap may be a sort of field guide to real-world patterns with context on what's new/old, where they are used/useful, and so on.
- cwp 4y ago
  There's an element of truth to the "poor documentation" complaint, because there are tutorials etc out there that are out of date, incomplete etc. But the official nix project has excellent documentation. I think the problem is that nix is just hard to learn. It's really different from most package managers, but people expect to look at a few examples and just pick it up intuitively. It's a whole different paradigm, with a custom programming language that also has a different paradigm. (Though Haskell folks eat it right up... no surprise there.) It's gonna take time and effort to learn it, and there's just no way around it.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > But the official nix project has excellent documentation. If it does, it's really well hidden. Because the nix manual certainly is not that. > I think the problem is that nix is just hard to learn. No, the problem is that nix offers no guidance or real help along that path. You go to https://nixos.org/learn.html https://nixos.org/learn.html and you've got essentially nothing helpful beyond the installation (which is easy enough). And it gets really bad when you get there from https://nixos.org/explore.html https://nixos.org/explore.html with no prior knowledge. > Though Haskell folks eat it right up... no surprise there. They're used to having to power through absent documentation?
- rekado 4y ago
  > It’s too bad guix went full hardcore FOSS and refuses to support macs, This is either a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the issue. We don't refuse to support Macs. Consider this: - the value of Guix is in building up a package graph all the way from the very bottom (a tiny binary seed without parallel in other distros); this uses glibc. - glibc doesn't support Darwin - the only way to build software on a mac is to sign an EULA and use proprietary software (Xcode and the SDK). It's easier to build software for Windows than for a Mac. If it was about "full hardcore FOSS" (what a weirdly judgmental term!) then we wouldn't support building for WSL or cross-compilation to mingw64, but we do. Personally, I have no interest in working my ass off to get a subpar implementation of the package graph grafted on top of a huge binary blob (Xcode and the SDK) just to elevate a highly restrictive proprietary platform. Until Apple commissions this kind of work it is still preferable to just use Guix in a virtualized GNU system.
  - tsuujin 4y ago
    > … just to elevate a highly restrictive proprietary platform. This is the attitude I’m referring to when I say “hardcore FOSS”. You can choose to see it as a judgement if you want, but I view it as an implementation detail precluding my use of Guix. “It’s hard and it’s not worth my time” is totally fine, I don’t expect projects to cater to my needs; but it’s worth calling out that it really seems like your chief complaint is that Apple is not FOSS (aka: proprietary).
    - rekado 4y ago
      I can't build any software for macos without signing a contract and buying their hardware. The fact that it is proprietary is the obstacle here.
CapsAdmin 4y ago
I've only used nix at home for 2 months but my biggest pain point is just dealing with testing out random GitHub projects where I need to install dependencies from some language's package manager. There is usually a nix way, but I don't wanna build a custom nix script every time I want to test something out. However I found that using distrobox solves this problem for me quite well. It's a way to easily create and enter another distro from the terminal while it inherits everything else from the host. So whenever I want to try a random python project I just do it there and don't care about making a mess, while my host system is clean. I'm sure there are better ways to do these things, but I can't seem to find answers that don't seem to involve a lot of work.
- the_duke 4y ago
  There is a simple way, that is sadly not known enough: FHS environments. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-fhs-environments https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-fhs-environment...
viraptor 4y ago
> When we use NixOS, and we want to use a package that is not available under NixOS / Nixpkgs (which happens quite often), we have only one choice: pack it into NixOS. That's not the only way. It's definitely the easiest option, but you can also create a temporary fhs environment https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/nixpkgs/commit/05742c15d5a33381be54f41f1791b46e8832687b https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/nixpkgs/commit/05742c15d5a...
- nrabulinski 4y ago
  What’s even easier is using steam-run which is technically intended to run games which expect FHS environment on NixOS, but it works excellent to run any binary which was built on another distro
  - trynewideas 4y ago
    Toward the docs point, nowhere in the Nix manual do they spell out the FHS acronym. It's just the Linux derivation of the standard Unix filesystem structure, something that I never knew had a formal name (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) or centralized authority. That kind of re-emphasizes to me that regardless of the value Nix might offer me, I'm not and probably won't ever be the audience for it, because if it assumes I know that well enough to recognize it by acronym then it's going to assume I know a lot more than that. I can look forward to a few months of Googling and tangents just to get a grip on its fundamentals.
    - viraptor 4y ago
      You can't describe everything every time, at some point you need to use more concise naming for better communication. While it would be nice to improve things for beginners, this one seems pretty good already. Searching for "nix standard directory layout" brings up relevant blogs along with a Wikipedia page for FHS. Not bad.
    - ajb 4y ago
      To be fair, FHS isn't an acronym introduced by the nix project. It's not that well known though, so I do agree that it would make sense it introduce it. More generally, it seems that the nix documentation (including the reference docs) suffer from not having been developed systematically to introduce things in dependency order.
kkfx 4y ago
My very personal main pain point is documentation: Nix/NixOS do have some, but mostly or too little or deprecated. Where is a proper Flake documentation? Where is a proper $newNixFeatureInVogueNow? The second pain point is: Nix might sound nice to read and write as a language for Haskellers, but most people actually aren't haskellers... The third is essentially the fists, more specified: target. If the target is desktop, or server, or HPC, or development docs should be shaped per target. Actually NixOS is designed mostly with dev desktops and infra target, but docs are not even for new devs, more something added aside just because it's part of the duty provide them in some form...
- viraptor 4y ago
  > Where is a proper Flake documentation? That one actually exists in the right place. (Assuming you meant the flake file) https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-flake.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3...
  - kkfx 4y ago
    Let's say a new user start using NixOS: where he/she find a good starting point to quickly deploy hes/shes first flake-based NixOS test desktop? Than the user want a bit more, let's say "hey, since it's damn easy let's build a custom ISO with my testing desktop config for replication. Sure some blog posts do exists, but from official docs? A third point "oh, nice, now I have a reasonably good NixOS config, a way to deploy it from a custom ISO on a local machine. What about a LAN-wide deploy?" (here is the delirium, and ok, not only for NixOS but for most OS out there, NixOS in particular have stared NixOps, but now seems a bit abandoned, Disnix is not really documented and so on). That's why my third point is separated from the first: what's the target? The above example is what I see as a classic GNU/Linux nerdy/a bit navigated user path to NixOS for a personal usage as a desktop and for a home-lab-alike infra. For such target there is no good docs at all. For some niche, like HPC for Guix, again there is nothing "targeted". Similarly for all NixOS use cases I can imaging. That's why I conclude that docs was produced as a separate stuff "we need to have, not nice to made, not really useful" instead of the base to create newcomers paths to NixOS and also drive future design decisions because writing targeted docs in natural language is the best way to spot very high level logical design issues very hard to get up front discussing between devs and quickly produced code.
pshirshov 4y ago
The real pain points are: 1) Abysmal contributor experience 2) Lack of typing in nix language and very limited debugging capabilities 3) Lack of interface concept in nix language 4) Lack of any markings on dependency graph edge 5) (3) and (4) makes impossible to have anything alike to gentoo's slots. Nix might be the only right way of doing slotting but it's effectively incapable of that.
- viraptor 4y ago
  What do you mean in pt 1? I've not experienced any issues there, but curious to hear from others.
  - pshirshov 4y ago
    Normal flow in other distros I contributed to: "thanks for the patch, we'll do the rest". Nix flow: your patch is not done according to our guidelines, so fuck off. Still not. Still not. Read the guidelines. Still not, read the guidelines. You have to squash commits manually, we won't enable autosquashing because someone important doesn't like them. Nope, your time isn't valuable because there are too many of you and just one nix. It's like they enjoy spending time to tell occasional contributors, who can't memorize all nix rituals, "fuck off" instead of spending that time to do the necessary finishing touches. So, critical issues/vulnerabilities remain unpatched, some formulas are outdated by 5 years, because the relevant maintainer says the old package works for him but new one breaks something on his machine and offers to investigate his issue on your own by a single log line. Of course completely ignoring all _your_ issues which are fixed in an upstream patch made one year ago. I know people who decided not to make a single contribution to nixpkgs until the things change because of that shitshow and I joined that movement. It's really easier to have a personal private fork of nixpkgs and make all the changes there instead of dealing with the upstream and that's what I would strongly recommend to any nix newcomer.
    - lom 4y ago
      This couldn’t be any further from my experience. Instead of being told fuck off, I was offered (and later offered when I became a maintainer myself) constructive criticism, often times with the patches, required to make it up to standard, included. > maintainer says the old package works for him We’re all just volunteers, who are doing this in our free time. Usually this works well enough for most packages, but you are always free to submit the fix yourself on nixpkgs ;). At least compared to other distros, that workflow simpler.
guilhas 4y ago
> The documentation of Nix and NixOS is rather poor. To understand how a service or an option works, it is very often necessary to read the source code (`.nix’ files) ... I think this is also a plus point, for Guix and Nix, how easy you can check the parent file dependencies, which are the same language as the configuration you're creating, and are easy to understand
- YoshiRulz 4y ago
  Except in Nixpkgs, where it's tedious to go from the package's expression (easy enough to find from NixOS Search) to where it's called in `all-packages.nix` or to the various helpers exposed in `lib`. But there are multiple efforts to make jumping to declarations easier in the new CLI and even to rearchitect Nixpkgs.
amelius 4y ago
My main problem is that Nix is based on one version of libc. If your system already has vendor-locked libraries based on a different version of libc, then it is quite difficult to get the rest of the system on that same version of libc.
- abathur 4y ago
  What systems have you encountered this on? (just curious; not trying to minimize)
  - amelius 4y ago
    Nvidia Jetson
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    Arch Linux. I have to use Nix for a project and it broke almost every time Arch updated its glibc which made it a pretty horrendous experience.
- ratorx 4y ago
  This should be fairly straightforward with overlays (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Overlays https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Overlays) right? Just overlay libc package with the version you want to use. The main disadvantage of doing this is that you lose the binary cache and will need to rebuild your system from scratch. This will eventually be solved (content-addressable packages), but that needs reproducibility guarantees that current compilers don’t provide.
rgoulter 4y ago
Regarding the second point, ("it's not enough to have the same /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file, because of environment variables, other files, and commit revisions of repos used"), this is one thing which Nix Flakes solves. With nix flakes, all the Nix sources you use must be checked into source control, and impurities like environment variables can't be used (by default).
- Reventlov 4y ago
  This is actually the opposite, by default, impurities like environment variables can still be used, as well as binaries, or other things ! A small example : ``` [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ cat flake.nix { inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-22.11"; }; outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux; in { devShell.x86_64-linux = with pkgs; pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [ python3Packages.pelican python3Packages.markdown ]; }; }; } [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ export HELLO="WORLD" [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ nix develop warning: Git tree '/home/remy/Blog' is dirty [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ echo $HELLO WORLD ``` And, because flakes are not stable, you need to enable them with e.g. `--experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'`. And by default, you can still access outside binaries, like let's say ls ! Which is why, to have real hermetic builds, in Guix for example, it's advised to run in containers and so on.
  - rgoulter 4y ago
    > by default, impurities like environment variables can still be used In a `nix develop` shell? Ah, sure. -- I don't think the new nix commands have the same functionality that `nix-shell --pure` had. But, in nix expressions used, in order to use environment variables (or to fetch from URLs without using a known sha256), the `--impure` flag needs to be passed.
    - abathur 4y ago
      I haven't used it, but afaict the --ignore-environment flag is intended for roughly the same usecase. https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4359#issuecomment-907768110 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4359#issuecomment-907768... notes some differences.
Foxboron 4y ago
Slight misunderstanding in the blog post there. > Archlinux is 78% reproducible on amd64 packages > Debian is 95.7% reproducible on amd64 packages This references the "fuzzing" infrastructure hosted by the Reproducible Builds project, and doesn't show "true" reproduction of binaries. It's designed to help us figure out where impurites occur in builds. Proper package reproduction is much better in Arch because we don't have to care about all differences that can occur since our build systems are mostly static. The true number hover around 86%-90%, which is better than the CI system. https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ The main issues here is regressions in compilers, build tooling and leaky abstractions that needs to be found and patched. An example is how i spent a month tracking down a gcc bug that caused cgo builds to be unreproducible. https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/413974 https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/413974
- oflor 4y ago
  > This references the "fuzzing" infrastructure hosted by the Reproducible Builds project, and doesn't show "true" reproduction of binaries. It's designed to help us figure out where impurites occur in builds. I think the "fuzzing" approach is actually the correct one. The fact that build systems are static does not improve reproducibility on its own, as the idea is that the packages could be built on different systems and result in the same binaries. If I built some Arch PKGBUILDs from the official community repo, I should still get the same binary, despite the fact that my machine has a different setup from the Arch project's own infra.
- Reventlov 4y ago
  Thanks for the details, i'll update the numbers for Arch !
nemoniac 4y ago
The article mentions Guix several times but never once mentions as a pain point that Nix lacks a well-founded programming language. Now I may be a total outlier here but it seems to me that while getting the fundamental concepts right is a good thing, having powerful means of combining them becomes more important in the long run. Does that not speak in Guix' favour?
- Reventlov 4y ago
  It does for Guix, but it's not such a big deal in my opinion regarding Nix. Please note I didn't think about this in depth, but, yeah, of course, using Haskell or Ocaml would probably be cooler than some domain specific language. But I also believe the nix language also makes Nix more accessible at first than let's say Guile : entering into the Guix world is certainly more costly, and I feel Nix* capitalizes on this lower entry bar.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Haskell would have been a mistake. The Nix language is domain specific and self limiting and can be picked up pretty quickly in comparison. I can look at snippets in various configs and they will usually have a similar structure. If Haskell was used, then you'd find all kinds of custom operators and other more complicated things that make it really hard for beginners to understand. I switched from XMonad to Sway for this reason.
i_am_toaster 4y ago
You actually can search repos in their entirety on github now, think it’s a beta-feature you can enable or use. In other words, congrats, they’ve already indexed your entire codebase because they needed to for copilot.
xrd 4y ago
I agree with all the points in this post. And, I love NixOS. It's really special and very different than the other Linux I've used for 20 years. I have been curious to try Guix at some point. Does anyone know if there is a good comparison write-up? Also, can anyone speculate why the community has had such a hard time documenting this incredible technology? There are great posts like this from Xe: https://xeiaso.net/ https://xeiaso.net/ but not generally getting started guides that are up to date. Why is this so hard to do? I mean, I'm not doing it because I personally feel like everything I do to get something working on Nix is a quasi-hack and not the standard and most up-to-date way to do it, so I'm hesitant to share. But, surely there are experts that like to write. Is this a problem with a simple technology solution (choose a better documentation tool)?
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  I think the issue is that there's just so much to document. I worked my way through the Nix pills, and understood the language and philosophy. But then doing anything productive with it is just way bigger than I can get my head around. It's like the joke about drawing an owl: https://i.imgur.com/rCr9A.png https://i.imgur.com/rCr9A.png
- anon291 4y ago
  Realistically, the nix community is made up of a lot of functional programmers. I realize the nix language seems confusing to many, but to fp programmers, it's intuitive and there's not a whole lot to say about it.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    The main problem of nix is not even the nix language, though I've heard little good around its error handling and debugging. My admittedly shallow understanding is also that it doesn't matter that much because most of your time will be spent in the sprawling mess of nixpkgs. > it's intuitive The naming is very odd (e.g. why "sets" for dicts / records), and then it manages to make the language incompatible with itself by having attribute sets for values and a completely different syntax for attribute set parameters, no doubt because the language was ambiguous due to the lack of function prefix (also makes curried functions awkward). Like, there's nothing hard to it, but the entire language feels awkward for no reason. Like "?" meaning "default value" in parameters but "has attribute" for navigation (where "or" is "default value"). > I realize the nix language seems confusing to many, but to fp programmers, it's intuitive and there's not a whole lot to say about it. XSLT is also a functional language. That doesn't make it not-awful.
domenkozar 4y ago
https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ covers most of these points as none of the complaints mentioned are design flaws, but they are just something we have yet to reach.
sunsunsunsun 4y ago
Been using nixos for about a month. It took me about a week to really start to grok Nix a tiny bit, I had to spend a lot of time on the forums asking questions or searching for questions because the discoverability of the documentation is low when you don't know the lingo. I'm loving it now though, I have 3 computers running it and a flake that I push to github. I can push changes to my flake and have all my systems reflect the changed with a quick nixos-rebuild. Also being able to roll back is invaluable. I reformatted one of my systems the other day and it only took about an hour to have my whole system in the exact same state it was before with all my tooling and files.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > It took me about a week to really start to grok Nix a tiny bit, I had to spend a lot of time on the forums asking questions or searching for questions because the discoverability of the documentation is low when you don't know the lingo. Do you have resources you would recommend on that front? Having to go to forums over and over and hope a kind stranger will take pity doesn't seem scalable.

137 points by Reventlov 4y ago

I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don’t think I could really recommend to any of my peers. It’s too bad guix went full hardcore FOSS and refuses to support macs, because they seem to have better docs and using a language that I can use outside of my package manager makes a lot more sense to me.

40yearoldman 4y ago
I keep reading, this, and keeping being told this. Yet I switched every system over to nix and have found no thing but the best examples documentation and help from nix to do so. Within the span of a afternoon and a bit a reading I went from zero, to a script that lets me setup an entire dev systems with just a few commands in a vm, and or even on hardware. If anything the Nix documentation is just as good as every other thing out there. What is different is there are more than one way to do many things in Nix. This to me I think is the core of complaints. Its a language, and thus the language has may expressions that result in the same outcome. The second bit I think people struggle with is it is functional. If you look at Nix complaints they appear to nearly be identical to that of Haskell.
- CapsAdmin 4y ago
  I also didn't notice that the documentation was especially bad. I'm thinking maybe it makes more sense for some programmers?
- kstenerud 4y ago
  Then you are a superhuman. I too went through weeks of pain and suffering to get my nixos hypervisor running, and if I were to lose my script and have to start from scratch again, I'd just install Debian instead. I would never recommend nixos to anyone. The concept is awesome, but the execution is terrible.
  - prox 4y ago
    What I often find is this “ought to know” treshold. Parent comment user is probably familiar with lingo you are not. Documentation often assumes a certain level and a writer does not imagine a less capable user.
    - pxc 4y ago
      Yes, the Nix community has great reference docs for people who already know how things work, for most things imo. At the same time, it isn't always obvious enough where to find a good introduction to terms and concepts used. But materials of that kind are increasingly available and general gaps are being filled with a lot of focus lately.
- laserlight 4y ago
  By documentation, I believe people mean tutorials. At least, lack of tutorials is my complaint. I've read all introductory material. I want to build a customized version of emacs on nix, yet I have no idea how to do it or where to start.
  - scoopertrooper 4y ago
    Why use a tutorial when ChatGPT has you covered? > How do I create a nix package that clones eMacs from GitHub and builds it from source? { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, fetchFromGitHub }: let emacsSrc = fetchFromGitHub { owner = "emacs-mirror"; repo = "emacs"; rev = "master"; sha256 = "0xabcd1234"; }; in pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "emacs"; version = "27.1"; src = emacsSrc; buildInputs = [ pkgs.autoconf pkgs.make ]; configurePhase = '' autoconf ./configure --prefix=$out ''; buildPhase = "make"; installPhase = "make install"; }
    - delroth 4y ago
      As usual for ChatGPT this is full of mistakes and bad code. The buildPhase and installPhase it writes are completely unnecessary and worse than the default, the configurePhase might work in some cases but most likely won't, and it's unnecessary when instead autoreconfHook should be used, stdenv/autoconf should be taken as an argument for the function returning the derivation, autoconf should be a nativeBuildInput, make is already in stdenv, etc.
      - toastal 4y ago
        You're also supposed to call the pre and post hooks for these phases.
      - Rexogamer 4y ago
        More fundamentally, even if the code produced by ChatGPT worked and was high-quality, why should a new user have to rely on a chatbot instead of useful/up-to-date tutorials and guides?
    - 4y ago
- masklinn 4y ago
  > It's a language, and thus the language has may expressions that result in the same outcome. First it's a distribution and a package manager, and the guidance regarding these is sub-par. Especially with what there is of documentation being split between the old and new UIs, then being told about flakes but that they're experimental so it's not clear whether you should or should not use them. I just went to the nix website, clicked "first steps with nix" and I get https://nixos.org/guides/ad-hoc-developer-environments.html https://nixos.org/guides/ad-hoc-developer-environments.html Is that useful? I'm sure to somebody who already knows what they want out of nix it is, but the first thing I'm told is that shell environments exist and are useful to "use the tool without having to install the software.". Ok, but what if I want to install the software? Then there's listing of what's essentially a magical invocation out of nowhere: $ nix-shell -p 'python38.withPackages (packages: [ packages.django ])' I can understand that (or at least reach what I assume is an understanding), but there's no real explanation to give me knowledge to expand upon, if anything the explanations are worse than useless: > We create an ad hoc environment with $PYTHONPATH set and python available, along with the django package. thank you very much, that confirms I'd about interpreted the line correctly, but you've not told me what `withPackages` is or where `packages.django` comes out of so I'm not really helped. And apparently the next step is "declarative and reproducible developer environments", or possibly "towards reproducibility: pinning Nixpkgs"? Or even better, "To quickly setup a Nix project read through Getting started Nix template", I have no clue what a nix project is or why I'd want one. There's not just a step missing here, there's an entire floor, possibly building. It's like the nix community saw how git is taught and went "we can do worse".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - soraminazuki 4y ago
    > Is that useful? I'm sure to somebody who already knows what they want out of nix it is, but the first thing I'm told is that shell environments exist and are useful to "use the tool without having to install the software.". Ok, but what if I want to install the software? Why would you go to https://nixos.org/learn.html https://nixos.org/learn.html, click on an introductory example titled "Ad-hoc developer environments" and complain that it doesn't explain how to permanently install software? > but there's no real explanation to give me knowledge to expand upon Again, you're pointing to a page containing TLDR examples. That's not the right place for an in-depth explanation. > There's not just a step missing here, there's an entire floor, possibly building. It's like the nix community saw how git is taught and went "we can do worse". No surprise because you missed the entire manual.
- soraminazuki 4y ago
  Nix actually has far better than average documentation compared to other typical open source projects. I started using Nix years ago on Ubuntu to quickly install a package that wasn't present in Ubuntu's repository. Eventually, I began customizing packages using Nix expressions. Before I knew it, I migrated my existing systems over to NixOS. What I can say is it wasn't at all the uphill struggle that's associated with Nix in online discussions. Even though the documentation isn't perfect and going through active improvements, there's a considerable gap between Nix's reputation regarding documentation and my own actual experience. What surprises me is that people tout RPM/Chef as easier replacements to Nix/NixOS. The assumption about those being "replacements" of each other is questionable because they address different needs. What's even more questionable is the part about RPM or Chef being easy. I have dealt with those two for years as part of my day job, and they're both far from easy. I still have troubles with them to this day. Documentation is far more lacking than Nix, and it's not because things are obvious. If you encounter any trouble, you almost always have to dive into the source code. Navigating the source code of RPM or Chef is a nightmare because the code is scattered across countless different repositories and it's impossible to guess where to look for to begin with. Choice of programming languages doen't help here too. Chef is written in Ruby, which has a tendency of making code ungreppable due to its metaprogramming features. RPM has its own macro syntax which works similar to the C preprocessor. It's very terse and full of gotchas. Navigating around Nix code is much, much easier in comparison. Everything you need is in a single repo, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs, and written in a JSON-like language. Many people also claim that Nix is hard because it requires a functional programming background. That too doesn't match my experience. Nix expressions are basically JSON with functions. Learning the syntax is a non-issue if you know JSON and some common programming language constructs like conditionals, functions, map, filter and reduce. The only functional programming exposure I had prior to Nix was LISP, in a university classroom. Yet I didn't experience problems learning the syntax. The hard part is learning how to actually utilize the language. The documentation and some grepping around of the Nixpkgs codebase helped a lot with this.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  My complaint is chiefly about practical implementation. “I want to use nix as a package manager across systems” is far too difficult for a new user. One document tells you to flakes, another tells you that it’s experimental and should be avoided. One document tells you that you should use Darwin modules and home manager, and then completely omits the fact that the linked home manager scripts don’t work with Darwin by design leading to “why the fuck isn’t this file they tell me should be auto generated not being created”. Because the official docs don’t seem to cover real world use cases, you end up relying on a labyrinth of out of date and conflicting user contributed tutorials and it is very frustrating. Once you know what to do nix is simple enough, but learning what to do is outright painful; if you don’t believe me look to the other replies to my comment.
Reventlov 4y ago
I agree with the Guix bit. At some point, I tried using Guix System on my laptop (with wireless support), and of course I was greeted with « use a wifi card that respect your freedom » or something of the sort. At some point, I might try again, using NonGuix ( https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix ), but right now I'm not using Guix SD. Instead, I try to use Guix on small projects (like building websites using pelican), without going full Guix. What I'm most impressed with Guix is the time machine and Software Heritage integration, but it still needs a lot of improvement for developers, for example allowing to specify environment variables in manifest.scm files.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  Nonguix is new to me. I may give it a look at some point but I’m already over the pain threshold on nix. Any idea if nonguix will allow an install on macOS? I really want a system like this that I can use on my work MacBook and remote Linux servers.
- sierkov 4y ago
  > for example allowing to specify environment variables in manifest.scm files. There is already .envrc or .dir-locals.el? And manifest is just - well - manifest. By definition it has to be 'plain'. I mean, there are already a million ways to load env vars so why'd you want guix to do that too and from manifest.scm of all places?
  - Reventlov 4y ago
    Because instead of distributing two files (channels.scm and manifest.scm, or flake.lock and flake.nix), you have to execute monstruosities like `guix shell --container -m ./manifest.scm -- bash -c 'GUIX_LOCPATH=$GUIX_ENVIRONMENT/lib/locale LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf-8 exec jekyll build'`, which is how I build some websites I have. To me, that's not ok from an user experience point of view.
    - sierkov 4y ago
      Exactly my point. You can already do it with direnv, have guix shell once you cd into dir and then just do `jekyll build`.
bollos 4y ago
This sadly also sums up my short-lived stay with NixOS. Tried on multiple occasions to get a working system to no avail and ultimately made me go back to Fedora where I remain until this day.
prox 4y ago
It’s typical of certain areas in tech (like here) to not document, to not care about up to date information, and only as a last resort. You need people who can manage that and create a culture of documenting.
abathur 4y ago
I have been starting to suspect that a big part of the gap may be a sort of field guide to real-world patterns with context on what's new/old, where they are used/useful, and so on.
cwp 4y ago
There's an element of truth to the "poor documentation" complaint, because there are tutorials etc out there that are out of date, incomplete etc. But the official nix project has excellent documentation. I think the problem is that nix is just hard to learn. It's really different from most package managers, but people expect to look at a few examples and just pick it up intuitively. It's a whole different paradigm, with a custom programming language that also has a different paradigm. (Though Haskell folks eat it right up... no surprise there.) It's gonna take time and effort to learn it, and there's just no way around it.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > But the official nix project has excellent documentation. If it does, it's really well hidden. Because the nix manual certainly is not that. > I think the problem is that nix is just hard to learn. No, the problem is that nix offers no guidance or real help along that path. You go to https://nixos.org/learn.html https://nixos.org/learn.html and you've got essentially nothing helpful beyond the installation (which is easy enough). And it gets really bad when you get there from https://nixos.org/explore.html https://nixos.org/explore.html with no prior knowledge. > Though Haskell folks eat it right up... no surprise there. They're used to having to power through absent documentation?
rekado 4y ago
> It’s too bad guix went full hardcore FOSS and refuses to support macs, This is either a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the issue. We don't refuse to support Macs. Consider this: - the value of Guix is in building up a package graph all the way from the very bottom (a tiny binary seed without parallel in other distros); this uses glibc. - glibc doesn't support Darwin - the only way to build software on a mac is to sign an EULA and use proprietary software (Xcode and the SDK). It's easier to build software for Windows than for a Mac. If it was about "full hardcore FOSS" (what a weirdly judgmental term!) then we wouldn't support building for WSL or cross-compilation to mingw64, but we do. Personally, I have no interest in working my ass off to get a subpar implementation of the package graph grafted on top of a huge binary blob (Xcode and the SDK) just to elevate a highly restrictive proprietary platform. Until Apple commissions this kind of work it is still preferable to just use Guix in a virtualized GNU system.
- tsuujin 4y ago
  > … just to elevate a highly restrictive proprietary platform. This is the attitude I’m referring to when I say “hardcore FOSS”. You can choose to see it as a judgement if you want, but I view it as an implementation detail precluding my use of Guix. “It’s hard and it’s not worth my time” is totally fine, I don’t expect projects to cater to my needs; but it’s worth calling out that it really seems like your chief complaint is that Apple is not FOSS (aka: proprietary).
  - rekado 4y ago
    I can't build any software for macos without signing a contract and buying their hardware. The fact that it is proprietary is the obstacle here.

CapsAdmin 4y ago

I've only used nix at home for 2 months but my biggest pain point is just dealing with testing out random GitHub projects where I need to install dependencies from some language's package manager. There is usually a nix way, but I don't wanna build a custom nix script every time I want to test something out. However I found that using distrobox solves this problem for me quite well. It's a way to easily create and enter another distro from the terminal while it inherits everything else from the host. So whenever I want to try a random python project I just do it there and don't care about making a mess, while my host system is clean. I'm sure there are better ways to do these things, but I can't seem to find answers that don't seem to involve a lot of work.

the_duke 4y ago
There is a simple way, that is sadly not known enough: FHS environments. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-fhs-environments https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-fhs-environment...

viraptor 4y ago

> When we use NixOS, and we want to use a package that is not available under NixOS / Nixpkgs (which happens quite often), we have only one choice: pack it into NixOS. That's not the only way. It's definitely the easiest option, but you can also create a temporary fhs environment https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/nixpkgs/commit/05742c15d5a33381be54f41f1791b46e8832687b https://github.com/ElvishJerricco/nixpkgs/commit/05742c15d5a...

nrabulinski 4y ago
What’s even easier is using steam-run which is technically intended to run games which expect FHS environment on NixOS, but it works excellent to run any binary which was built on another distro
- trynewideas 4y ago
  Toward the docs point, nowhere in the Nix manual do they spell out the FHS acronym. It's just the Linux derivation of the standard Unix filesystem structure, something that I never knew had a formal name (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) or centralized authority. That kind of re-emphasizes to me that regardless of the value Nix might offer me, I'm not and probably won't ever be the audience for it, because if it assumes I know that well enough to recognize it by acronym then it's going to assume I know a lot more than that. I can look forward to a few months of Googling and tangents just to get a grip on its fundamentals.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    You can't describe everything every time, at some point you need to use more concise naming for better communication. While it would be nice to improve things for beginners, this one seems pretty good already. Searching for "nix standard directory layout" brings up relevant blogs along with a Wikipedia page for FHS. Not bad.
  - ajb 4y ago
    To be fair, FHS isn't an acronym introduced by the nix project. It's not that well known though, so I do agree that it would make sense it introduce it. More generally, it seems that the nix documentation (including the reference docs) suffer from not having been developed systematically to introduce things in dependency order.

kkfx 4y ago

My very personal main pain point is documentation: Nix/NixOS do have some, but mostly or too little or deprecated. Where is a proper Flake documentation? Where is a proper $newNixFeatureInVogueNow? The second pain point is: Nix might sound nice to read and write as a language for Haskellers, but most people actually aren't haskellers... The third is essentially the fists, more specified: target. If the target is desktop, or server, or HPC, or development docs should be shaped per target. Actually NixOS is designed mostly with dev desktops and infra target, but docs are not even for new devs, more something added aside just because it's part of the duty provide them in some form...

viraptor 4y ago
> Where is a proper Flake documentation? That one actually exists in the right place. (Assuming you meant the flake file) https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-flake.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3...
- kkfx 4y ago
  Let's say a new user start using NixOS: where he/she find a good starting point to quickly deploy hes/shes first flake-based NixOS test desktop? Than the user want a bit more, let's say "hey, since it's damn easy let's build a custom ISO with my testing desktop config for replication. Sure some blog posts do exists, but from official docs? A third point "oh, nice, now I have a reasonably good NixOS config, a way to deploy it from a custom ISO on a local machine. What about a LAN-wide deploy?" (here is the delirium, and ok, not only for NixOS but for most OS out there, NixOS in particular have stared NixOps, but now seems a bit abandoned, Disnix is not really documented and so on). That's why my third point is separated from the first: what's the target? The above example is what I see as a classic GNU/Linux nerdy/a bit navigated user path to NixOS for a personal usage as a desktop and for a home-lab-alike infra. For such target there is no good docs at all. For some niche, like HPC for Guix, again there is nothing "targeted". Similarly for all NixOS use cases I can imaging. That's why I conclude that docs was produced as a separate stuff "we need to have, not nice to made, not really useful" instead of the base to create newcomers paths to NixOS and also drive future design decisions because writing targeted docs in natural language is the best way to spot very high level logical design issues very hard to get up front discussing between devs and quickly produced code.

pshirshov 4y ago

The real pain points are: 1) Abysmal contributor experience 2) Lack of typing in nix language and very limited debugging capabilities 3) Lack of interface concept in nix language 4) Lack of any markings on dependency graph edge 5) (3) and (4) makes impossible to have anything alike to gentoo's slots. Nix might be the only right way of doing slotting but it's effectively incapable of that.

viraptor 4y ago
What do you mean in pt 1? I've not experienced any issues there, but curious to hear from others.
- pshirshov 4y ago
  Normal flow in other distros I contributed to: "thanks for the patch, we'll do the rest". Nix flow: your patch is not done according to our guidelines, so fuck off. Still not. Still not. Read the guidelines. Still not, read the guidelines. You have to squash commits manually, we won't enable autosquashing because someone important doesn't like them. Nope, your time isn't valuable because there are too many of you and just one nix. It's like they enjoy spending time to tell occasional contributors, who can't memorize all nix rituals, "fuck off" instead of spending that time to do the necessary finishing touches. So, critical issues/vulnerabilities remain unpatched, some formulas are outdated by 5 years, because the relevant maintainer says the old package works for him but new one breaks something on his machine and offers to investigate his issue on your own by a single log line. Of course completely ignoring all _your_ issues which are fixed in an upstream patch made one year ago. I know people who decided not to make a single contribution to nixpkgs until the things change because of that shitshow and I joined that movement. It's really easier to have a personal private fork of nixpkgs and make all the changes there instead of dealing with the upstream and that's what I would strongly recommend to any nix newcomer.
  - lom 4y ago
    This couldn’t be any further from my experience. Instead of being told fuck off, I was offered (and later offered when I became a maintainer myself) constructive criticism, often times with the patches, required to make it up to standard, included. > maintainer says the old package works for him We’re all just volunteers, who are doing this in our free time. Usually this works well enough for most packages, but you are always free to submit the fix yourself on nixpkgs ;). At least compared to other distros, that workflow simpler.

guilhas 4y ago

> The documentation of Nix and NixOS is rather poor. To understand how a service or an option works, it is very often necessary to read the source code (`.nix’ files) ... I think this is also a plus point, for Guix and Nix, how easy you can check the parent file dependencies, which are the same language as the configuration you're creating, and are easy to understand

YoshiRulz 4y ago
Except in Nixpkgs, where it's tedious to go from the package's expression (easy enough to find from NixOS Search) to where it's called in `all-packages.nix` or to the various helpers exposed in `lib`. But there are multiple efforts to make jumping to declarations easier in the new CLI and even to rearchitect Nixpkgs.

amelius 4y ago

My main problem is that Nix is based on one version of libc. If your system already has vendor-locked libraries based on a different version of libc, then it is quite difficult to get the rest of the system on that same version of libc.

abathur 4y ago
What systems have you encountered this on? (just curious; not trying to minimize)
- amelius 4y ago
  Nvidia Jetson
- jcelerier 4y ago
  Arch Linux. I have to use Nix for a project and it broke almost every time Arch updated its glibc which made it a pretty horrendous experience.
ratorx 4y ago
This should be fairly straightforward with overlays (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Overlays https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Overlays) right? Just overlay libc package with the version you want to use. The main disadvantage of doing this is that you lose the binary cache and will need to rebuild your system from scratch. This will eventually be solved (content-addressable packages), but that needs reproducibility guarantees that current compilers don’t provide.

rgoulter 4y ago

Regarding the second point, ("it's not enough to have the same /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file, because of environment variables, other files, and commit revisions of repos used"), this is one thing which Nix Flakes solves. With nix flakes, all the Nix sources you use must be checked into source control, and impurities like environment variables can't be used (by default).

Reventlov 4y ago
This is actually the opposite, by default, impurities like environment variables can still be used, as well as binaries, or other things ! A small example : ``` [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ cat flake.nix { inputs = { nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-22.11"; }; outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux; in { devShell.x86_64-linux = with pkgs; pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [ python3Packages.pelican python3Packages.markdown ]; }; }; } [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ export HELLO="WORLD" [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ nix develop warning: Git tree '/home/remy/Blog' is dirty [remy@typhoon:~/Blog]$ echo $HELLO WORLD ``` And, because flakes are not stable, you need to enable them with e.g. `--experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'`. And by default, you can still access outside binaries, like let's say ls ! Which is why, to have real hermetic builds, in Guix for example, it's advised to run in containers and so on.
- rgoulter 4y ago
  > by default, impurities like environment variables can still be used In a `nix develop` shell? Ah, sure. -- I don't think the new nix commands have the same functionality that `nix-shell --pure` had. But, in nix expressions used, in order to use environment variables (or to fetch from URLs without using a known sha256), the `--impure` flag needs to be passed.
  - abathur 4y ago
    I haven't used it, but afaict the --ignore-environment flag is intended for roughly the same usecase. https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4359#issuecomment-907768110 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4359#issuecomment-907768... notes some differences.

Foxboron 4y ago

Slight misunderstanding in the blog post there. > Archlinux is 78% reproducible on amd64 packages > Debian is 95.7% reproducible on amd64 packages This references the "fuzzing" infrastructure hosted by the Reproducible Builds project, and doesn't show "true" reproduction of binaries. It's designed to help us figure out where impurites occur in builds. Proper package reproduction is much better in Arch because we don't have to care about all differences that can occur since our build systems are mostly static. The true number hover around 86%-90%, which is better than the CI system. https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ The main issues here is regressions in compilers, build tooling and leaky abstractions that needs to be found and patched. An example is how i spent a month tracking down a gcc bug that caused cgo builds to be unreproducible. https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/413974 https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/413974

oflor 4y ago
> This references the "fuzzing" infrastructure hosted by the Reproducible Builds project, and doesn't show "true" reproduction of binaries. It's designed to help us figure out where impurites occur in builds. I think the "fuzzing" approach is actually the correct one. The fact that build systems are static does not improve reproducibility on its own, as the idea is that the packages could be built on different systems and result in the same binaries. If I built some Arch PKGBUILDs from the official community repo, I should still get the same binary, despite the fact that my machine has a different setup from the Arch project's own infra.
Reventlov 4y ago
Thanks for the details, i'll update the numbers for Arch !

nemoniac 4y ago

The article mentions Guix several times but never once mentions as a pain point that Nix lacks a well-founded programming language. Now I may be a total outlier here but it seems to me that while getting the fundamental concepts right is a good thing, having powerful means of combining them becomes more important in the long run. Does that not speak in Guix' favour?

Reventlov 4y ago
It does for Guix, but it's not such a big deal in my opinion regarding Nix. Please note I didn't think about this in depth, but, yeah, of course, using Haskell or Ocaml would probably be cooler than some domain specific language. But I also believe the nix language also makes Nix more accessible at first than let's say Guile : entering into the Guix world is certainly more costly, and I feel Nix* capitalizes on this lower entry bar.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Haskell would have been a mistake. The Nix language is domain specific and self limiting and can be picked up pretty quickly in comparison. I can look at snippets in various configs and they will usually have a similar structure. If Haskell was used, then you'd find all kinds of custom operators and other more complicated things that make it really hard for beginners to understand. I switched from XMonad to Sway for this reason.

i_am_toaster 4y ago

You actually can search repos in their entirety on github now, think it’s a beta-feature you can enable or use. In other words, congrats, they’ve already indexed your entire codebase because they needed to for copilot.

xrd 4y ago

I agree with all the points in this post. And, I love NixOS. It's really special and very different than the other Linux I've used for 20 years. I have been curious to try Guix at some point. Does anyone know if there is a good comparison write-up? Also, can anyone speculate why the community has had such a hard time documenting this incredible technology? There are great posts like this from Xe: https://xeiaso.net/ https://xeiaso.net/ but not generally getting started guides that are up to date. Why is this so hard to do? I mean, I'm not doing it because I personally feel like everything I do to get something working on Nix is a quasi-hack and not the standard and most up-to-date way to do it, so I'm hesitant to share. But, surely there are experts that like to write. Is this a problem with a simple technology solution (choose a better documentation tool)?

Manuel_D 4y ago
I think the issue is that there's just so much to document. I worked my way through the Nix pills, and understood the language and philosophy. But then doing anything productive with it is just way bigger than I can get my head around. It's like the joke about drawing an owl: https://i.imgur.com/rCr9A.png https://i.imgur.com/rCr9A.png
anon291 4y ago
Realistically, the nix community is made up of a lot of functional programmers. I realize the nix language seems confusing to many, but to fp programmers, it's intuitive and there's not a whole lot to say about it.
- masklinn 4y ago
  The main problem of nix is not even the nix language, though I've heard little good around its error handling and debugging. My admittedly shallow understanding is also that it doesn't matter that much because most of your time will be spent in the sprawling mess of nixpkgs. > it's intuitive The naming is very odd (e.g. why "sets" for dicts / records), and then it manages to make the language incompatible with itself by having attribute sets for values and a completely different syntax for attribute set parameters, no doubt because the language was ambiguous due to the lack of function prefix (also makes curried functions awkward). Like, there's nothing hard to it, but the entire language feels awkward for no reason. Like "?" meaning "default value" in parameters but "has attribute" for navigation (where "or" is "default value"). > I realize the nix language seems confusing to many, but to fp programmers, it's intuitive and there's not a whole lot to say about it. XSLT is also a functional language. That doesn't make it not-awful.

domenkozar 4y ago

https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ covers most of these points as none of the complaints mentioned are design flaws, but they are just something we have yet to reach.

sunsunsunsun 4y ago

Been using nixos for about a month. It took me about a week to really start to grok Nix a tiny bit, I had to spend a lot of time on the forums asking questions or searching for questions because the discoverability of the documentation is low when you don't know the lingo. I'm loving it now though, I have 3 computers running it and a flake that I push to github. I can push changes to my flake and have all my systems reflect the changed with a quick nixos-rebuild. Also being able to roll back is invaluable. I reformatted one of my systems the other day and it only took about an hour to have my whole system in the exact same state it was before with all my tooling and files.

masklinn 4y ago
> It took me about a week to really start to grok Nix a tiny bit, I had to spend a lot of time on the forums asking questions or searching for questions because the discoverability of the documentation is low when you don't know the lingo. Do you have resources you would recommend on that front? Having to go to forums over and over and hope a kind stranger will take pity doesn't seem scalable.