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As somebody who was curious about Nix, I was pretty turned off by my first exerpeince. I also found it humorous/ironic that for something that is all about lik

As somebody who was curious about Nix, I was pretty turned off by my first exerpeince. I also found it humorous/ironic that for something that is all about like... deterministic and reproducible or whatever: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/458#issuecomment-1019743603 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/458#issuecomment-1019743... it touched the system in a bunch of places and was a zoo to uninstall

grhmc 4y ago
I wonder if you've tried our installer? Part of its reason for existing is the ability to safely / completely uninstall.
pxc 4y ago
You used to be able to uninstall Nix on macOS with just `rm`. But the move towards multiuser by default combined with macOS changes restricting filesystem access really complicated things. :-\ Some of this, though: > touched the system in a bunch of places is probably unavoidable. For a daemon to persist, you have to plug into launchd. To get a writable /nix, you need a special volume. To plug into all the shell environments and set appropriate environment variables, you need to configure a bunch of shells. Some of that can be improved, for sure. Some of the logic for setting Nix profiles could be moved out of shell scripts, and then only a few static environment variables could be set in /etc/environment instead of modifying shell startup configurations to source a special script, for example. But the messiest part of a tool like Nix is always going to be where it plugs into some other system which has none of Nix's guarantees and isn't under Nix's control. An improved installer (maybe just like the one in the OP! I haven't tried it yet) is probably the best that can be done here, in automating the handling of those messy points of integration. But it will be a matter of hammering out bugs over time like for any old installer, rather than something that relies on the kinds of guarantees Nix tries to make for its own internal operations. An uninstaller for Nix is something that can (and should!) be done well, but not by simply relying on Nix's usual guide rails.
JamesSwift 4y ago
Yeah the Mac experience is less than ideal for sure. There seems to be some animosity to mac on the core team (not a dig, just an observation) so I think they tend to dance around the platform for UX things (and even functional support at times). I think Determinate are trying to fill that gap somewhat.
SuperSandro2000 4y ago
Blame apple for most of this.:) On Linux there are far few steps: - delete /nix - delete build users (could be removed in the future) - delete she'll script files in /etc/profile - delete systemd nix-daemon service - delete symlinks in user directory

grhmc 4y ago

I wonder if you've tried our installer? Part of its reason for existing is the ability to safely / completely uninstall.

pxc 4y ago

You used to be able to uninstall Nix on macOS with just `rm`. But the move towards multiuser by default combined with macOS changes restricting filesystem access really complicated things. :-\ Some of this, though: > touched the system in a bunch of places is probably unavoidable. For a daemon to persist, you have to plug into launchd. To get a writable /nix, you need a special volume. To plug into all the shell environments and set appropriate environment variables, you need to configure a bunch of shells. Some of that can be improved, for sure. Some of the logic for setting Nix profiles could be moved out of shell scripts, and then only a few static environment variables could be set in /etc/environment instead of modifying shell startup configurations to source a special script, for example. But the messiest part of a tool like Nix is always going to be where it plugs into some other system which has none of Nix's guarantees and isn't under Nix's control. An improved installer (maybe just like the one in the OP! I haven't tried it yet) is probably the best that can be done here, in automating the handling of those messy points of integration. But it will be a matter of hammering out bugs over time like for any old installer, rather than something that relies on the kinds of guarantees Nix tries to make for its own internal operations. An uninstaller for Nix is something that can (and should!) be done well, but not by simply relying on Nix's usual guide rails.

JamesSwift 4y ago

Yeah the Mac experience is less than ideal for sure. There seems to be some animosity to mac on the core team (not a dig, just an observation) so I think they tend to dance around the platform for UX things (and even functional support at times). I think Determinate are trying to fill that gap somewhat.

SuperSandro2000 4y ago

Blame apple for most of this.:) On Linux there are far few steps: - delete /nix - delete build users (could be removed in the future) - delete she'll script files in /etc/profile - delete systemd nix-daemon service - delete symlinks in user directory