> I think I understand Nix, too. I don't think so, not from what I'm reading. Not fully. Just comparing with Docker is a sign of limited understanding. Nix is

> I think I understand Nix, too. I don't think so, not from what I'm reading. Not fully. Just comparing with Docker is a sign of limited understanding. Nix is not really a Docker competitor. You can run Nix stuff in a Docker, and it can build you a docker container image as well. Orthogonal. It's just so happen that basic applications of Nix overlap with what Docker is often used for, so comparing the two might seems natural. But Nix is more and more fundamental: Nix is a shared language for software composition. Nix creates a Linux OS for me, prepares custom ISO with my fav. stuff built-in, prepares my home dir, maintains my servers, configures services I use, makes me a dev environment I can share inside my project, future-proofs ad-hoc scripts I wrote, builds me docker containers, builds rpm&debs, makes me cross-compiling toolchains, and so much more. Anyway, Nix does have an usability problem, but it's not fatal. It's not worse than usability of e.g. git, or even usability of Docker. Yeah. Docker. People now consider Docker a bread and butter of SWE, but there are still plenty of people that don't know how to use it, or need lots of help using it, and not much more than 5 years ago you'd have to drag your team and explain to everyone why it's beneficial to use it. And when things go south it takes quite a bit of understanding of the under-the-hood machinery to figure things out. And there are plenty of devs who know like 5 commands to handle git + github UI and when anything goes wrong need help. And people complain about UX of git every week on HN. Usability is 90% familiarity. Once you have enough people who know X well, they help people who don't and live goes on. Once you build a good mental model of Nix, it's actually very simple, elegant, natural and very usable. The error messages and other-UX-stuff sometimes suck, but it's surface level and fixable (thought requires lots of dev work). At this point I can't even imagine working without Nix, and giving up on things it allows me to do. It's really like a super-power. And it's been a great accelerator for teams and project I've introduced it to. I could maybe see something even better just replacing it, but once you really get Nix, there's not going back.