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It's kind of scary because Nix is one of the coolest concepts for how to manage Linux systems... Most everything else has so much baggage from things that were

It's kind of scary because Nix is one of the coolest concepts for how to manage Linux systems... Most everything else has so much baggage from things that were designed around hand-maintained, non-disposable installs. But the community does seem to be still tinkering focused. I miss the early 2000s when even the hackers seemed to want to make their stuff easy to use(although my source for that is I saw a screenshot of low orbit ion cannon one time, I don't actually know much about hacker history).

esjeon 3y ago
> But the community does seem to be still tinkering focused. Because Nix does NOT make packaging easier. Maintainers are the ones who create distros, and they can live a happy life with something as crude as PKGBUILD, since build instructions are almost always stable. Even for users, most of them just don't need to juggle with package versions. Bleeding edge is mostly covered by Arch and package pinning works ridiculously well for daily uses. So "make their stuff easy to use" doesn't apply here. Rather, Nix is harder to use in reality.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  I've never heard of Arch and only fairly rarely heard of Manjaro as being suitable for anyone but tinkerers, at least not in the way Android is. A few months ago Steam stopped working. Nobody seemed to know why. It's back now, but git-cola is gone and I'm not even sure how I broke it. Some nonsense about type errors in the hotkey module, which I don't have time to debug right now so I'm just ignoring and using the flatpak. Most everything I use on a daily basis has 100s of MBs of dependencies in several layers... Forgetting the virtualeng when pip installing something that happens to have a PyQT dependency and trashing my git cola is... not great and Linux is full of stuff like this. The amount of effort needed to avoid or fix this kind trouble is more that I imagine Nix would need if it was fully polished. On Nix I was able to package a Python app in a matter of hours, and

esjeon 3y ago

> But the community does seem to be still tinkering focused. Because Nix does NOT make packaging easier. Maintainers are the ones who create distros, and they can live a happy life with something as crude as PKGBUILD, since build instructions are almost always stable. Even for users, most of them just don't need to juggle with package versions. Bleeding edge is mostly covered by Arch and package pinning works ridiculously well for daily uses. So "make their stuff easy to use" doesn't apply here. Rather, Nix is harder to use in reality.

eternityforest 3y ago
I've never heard of Arch and only fairly rarely heard of Manjaro as being suitable for anyone but tinkerers, at least not in the way Android is. A few months ago Steam stopped working. Nobody seemed to know why. It's back now, but git-cola is gone and I'm not even sure how I broke it. Some nonsense about type errors in the hotkey module, which I don't have time to debug right now so I'm just ignoring and using the flatpak. Most everything I use on a daily basis has 100s of MBs of dependencies in several layers... Forgetting the virtualeng when pip installing something that happens to have a PyQT dependency and trashing my git cola is... not great and Linux is full of stuff like this. The amount of effort needed to avoid or fix this kind trouble is more that I imagine Nix would need if it was fully polished. On Nix I was able to package a Python app in a matter of hours, and