4 ms·

No thanks way to complicated. I like to use my computer not configure my OS. For OS geeks though it's probably neat.

eternityforest 3y ago
Nix looks like it will be ideal for that once it gets front end tools. Seems like it would be the perfect end user OS, with the right GUI admin system so nobody ever had to deal with Nix. I like the config file model a lot more than interactive commands, but it's neither discoverable nor copy pastable into the terminal. Most of the traditional Linux ecosystem seems to be built assuming that a person would be interactively managing individual computers, and automation just kind of gets stacked on top, or added much later. Like, fstab. For a long time all your entries were in one place, and some distros still just have one file. Which is fairly insane, because a script can't just have it's own file, it has to be able to edit the main one, which is in some space/tab separated format probably because JSON and the like didn't even exist, so there are scripts out there with "Add this line if this is not already present" code and all sorts of hacks. Plus, package management breaks stuff regularly, anything not in the base repos has to be carefully maintained to keep up. Which is almost impossible when there are so many distros to keep up with. So then you need flatpaks to fix it, but there's always some random bug in the flatpaks that doesn't get caught because there's fewer eyeballs... To me the entire Linux ecosystem is insane, and nobody should have to do something by typing a command interactively, that doesn't really help make things reproducible and predictable. It's like, an oil painting when what you actually wanted was a CAD model. Traditional Linux is kind of inherently for OS geeks, it assumes you want to have an install you keep for years that you tinker with and set up just right, whereas Nix seems to assume you want the install to be a commodity part, configured from some standardized options. I rarely see any area of computing that isn't improved greatly by declarative tech, so I'm a bit biased.
- thumbuddy 3y ago
  I prefer graphical interfaces to declarative languages with escape hatches to a lower level form. I don't like what can go wrong with declarative tools or APIs that are too high level. Don't get me wrong, SQL is brilliant, but I feel like when the complexity of the underlying system is high, declarative approaches become scarier and scarier. If something goes wrong or doesn't do what I need all those elided things are no longer elided and I'm now at the mercy of understanding all of it with no escape other than to upstream a change, kill a project, or change technologies. The Linux ecosystem is insane, but so is every software technology of sufficient size. I sincerely do not need my downloading of some tool I've never used to be reproduced, more than likely I will uninstall it after a half hour of playing with it. Or if I. In a dire situation, pin a version Different tastes for sure.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    There are definitely different use cases, but I generally find that complex black box tools are generally near perfect in practice. And a lot of the time, if there's a bug in the low level thing, it's in a less commonly used feature, and you can often reframe your project to do things in the same way everyone else does things. If someone else successfully used a complex framework, I assume I will be successful too, as long as I use it in exactly the same way as them. Sometimes that requires hacks that have a performance hit, but overall it cam still be faster than writing your own code that you wouldn't have time to optimize. I pretty rarely try any tool I wouldn't want pinned, since I don't tend to play around with the single-function more experimental stuff, and gravitate towards one size fits all kind of stuff(If I need to play a sound, I'll just use mpv, regardless of if there is something lighter or I don't need the features). If you are interested in tinkering at all then the whole thing goes out the window and complex tools become an "Abandon all hope" kind of thing though.
    - skulk 3y ago
      I don't think you're aware of this but the individual you're responding to has a vendetta against Nix. Watch and you'll see shallow dismissals of Nix on every thread here by them. From what I can tell, they tried it once, got frustrated which hurt their ego a bit so they take it out on every post here. Either way I like your comment and will refer to it for my evangelizing.
      - thumbuddy 3y ago
        It's not a vendetta it's an opinion. I don't like a technology, they do. We had a reasonable conversation about our view points. I did try it, it wasn't for me. Just like how I tried COBOL and that wasn't for me. That's life.

Nix looks like it will be ideal for that once it gets front end tools. Seems like it would be the perfect end user OS, with the right GUI admin system so nobody ever had to deal with Nix. I like the config file model a lot more than interactive commands, but it's neither discoverable nor copy pastable into the terminal. Most of the traditional Linux ecosystem seems to be built assuming that a person would be interactively managing individual computers, and automation just kind of gets stacked on top, or added much later. Like, fstab. For a long time all your entries were in one place, and some distros still just have one file. Which is fairly insane, because a script can't just have it's own file, it has to be able to edit the main one, which is in some space/tab separated format probably because JSON and the like didn't even exist, so there are scripts out there with "Add this line if this is not already present" code and all sorts of hacks. Plus, package management breaks stuff regularly, anything not in the base repos has to be carefully maintained to keep up. Which is almost impossible when there are so many distros to keep up with. So then you need flatpaks to fix it, but there's always some random bug in the flatpaks that doesn't get caught because there's fewer eyeballs... To me the entire Linux ecosystem is insane, and nobody should have to do something by typing a command interactively, that doesn't really help make things reproducible and predictable. It's like, an oil painting when what you actually wanted was a CAD model. Traditional Linux is kind of inherently for OS geeks, it assumes you want to have an install you keep for years that you tinker with and set up just right, whereas Nix seems to assume you want the install to be a commodity part, configured from some standardized options. I rarely see any area of computing that isn't improved greatly by declarative tech, so I'm a bit biased.

thumbuddy 3y ago
I prefer graphical interfaces to declarative languages with escape hatches to a lower level form. I don't like what can go wrong with declarative tools or APIs that are too high level. Don't get me wrong, SQL is brilliant, but I feel like when the complexity of the underlying system is high, declarative approaches become scarier and scarier. If something goes wrong or doesn't do what I need all those elided things are no longer elided and I'm now at the mercy of understanding all of it with no escape other than to upstream a change, kill a project, or change technologies. The Linux ecosystem is insane, but so is every software technology of sufficient size. I sincerely do not need my downloading of some tool I've never used to be reproduced, more than likely I will uninstall it after a half hour of playing with it. Or if I. In a dire situation, pin a version Different tastes for sure.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  There are definitely different use cases, but I generally find that complex black box tools are generally near perfect in practice. And a lot of the time, if there's a bug in the low level thing, it's in a less commonly used feature, and you can often reframe your project to do things in the same way everyone else does things. If someone else successfully used a complex framework, I assume I will be successful too, as long as I use it in exactly the same way as them. Sometimes that requires hacks that have a performance hit, but overall it cam still be faster than writing your own code that you wouldn't have time to optimize. I pretty rarely try any tool I wouldn't want pinned, since I don't tend to play around with the single-function more experimental stuff, and gravitate towards one size fits all kind of stuff(If I need to play a sound, I'll just use mpv, regardless of if there is something lighter or I don't need the features). If you are interested in tinkering at all then the whole thing goes out the window and complex tools become an "Abandon all hope" kind of thing though.
  - skulk 3y ago
    I don't think you're aware of this but the individual you're responding to has a vendetta against Nix. Watch and you'll see shallow dismissals of Nix on every thread here by them. From what I can tell, they tried it once, got frustrated which hurt their ego a bit so they take it out on every post here. Either way I like your comment and will refer to it for my evangelizing.
    - thumbuddy 3y ago
      It's not a vendetta it's an opinion. I don't like a technology, they do. We had a reasonable conversation about our view points. I did try it, it wasn't for me. Just like how I tried COBOL and that wasn't for me. That's life.