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> Nix has the same problem as Terraform: it solves a lot of problems, but you have to 'live and breathe' their DSL. I find it much more pleasant to live and br

> Nix has the same problem as Terraform: it solves a lot of problems, but you have to 'live and breathe' their DSL. I find it much more pleasant to live and breathe the NixOS configuration than to live and breathe someone else's OS. It's a bit like a woodworkers workshop. Do you prefer to have someone else configure the workshop or do rather tune it to your use-cases over time? > You're no longer learning/maintaining Linux - you're learning and maintaining Nix. I disagree. I learned more Linux fundamentals with NixOS (and via that the Arch documentation) than I learned from running Ubuntu.

mobiuscog 3y ago
> I find it much more pleasant to live and breathe the NixOS configuration than to live and breathe someone else's OS. I grew up with Linux and whilst it's changed, it's far more of my OS than what is provided by Nix. The idea is sound, to provide a more standard configuration, but that's what many Linux standards have done, and then been forked because people don't all think the same way - and they shouldn't. Sure, if you're running servers or otherwise need reproducible systems in production, there's absolutely a lot of value in Nix. For a personal computer, which is something I still value greatly, I don't want to be constrained so much, especially by a DSL that is not intuitive to me. I know Nix isn't 'new' and has just become more popular of late due to influencers, and I see the benefits for those that don't mind the aspects I mentioned, but it's absolutely not for me, or a lot of others I suspect. I will stick with Debian for stable, Arch for rolling, and see what occasional others (void, for example) have to offer at the time. I used to be a big fan of gentoo, and I still would prefer to build from source, but it doesn't offer anything beyond that - I would love a variant of gentoo that also isolated dependencies for each package. Then again, I suspect as flatpak continues to do well (or Canonical impose snaps everywhere) there will be even less space on the desktop for such 'personality' anyway.

mobiuscog 3y ago

> I find it much more pleasant to live and breathe the NixOS configuration than to live and breathe someone else's OS. I grew up with Linux and whilst it's changed, it's far more of my OS than what is provided by Nix. The idea is sound, to provide a more standard configuration, but that's what many Linux standards have done, and then been forked because people don't all think the same way - and they shouldn't. Sure, if you're running servers or otherwise need reproducible systems in production, there's absolutely a lot of value in Nix. For a personal computer, which is something I still value greatly, I don't want to be constrained so much, especially by a DSL that is not intuitive to me. I know Nix isn't 'new' and has just become more popular of late due to influencers, and I see the benefits for those that don't mind the aspects I mentioned, but it's absolutely not for me, or a lot of others I suspect. I will stick with Debian for stable, Arch for rolling, and see what occasional others (void, for example) have to offer at the time. I used to be a big fan of gentoo, and I still would prefer to build from source, but it doesn't offer anything beyond that - I would love a variant of gentoo that also isolated dependencies for each package. Then again, I suspect as flatpak continues to do well (or Canonical impose snaps everywhere) there will be even less space on the desktop for such 'personality' anyway.