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> someone like you or me who's willing to learn a completely new programming language to use an operating system No, it's the other way. I'm using NixOS becau

> someone like you or me who's willing to learn a completely new programming language to use an operating system No, it's the other way. I'm using NixOS because I want to understand Nix better. I want to understand Nix better so that I can help this crowd: > Most people and developers don't want to be a "participant". They need something that gets the job done. I met a guy last semester who wasted 4 months of his graduate program (structural proteomics) trying to puzzle out how to run some x-ray laser scattering analysis software that was written in FORTRAN and handed to him on a flash drive. He's the person I want to help. I want him to be able to install nix wherever and type `nix run github:foo/barlasers` and be happy that barlasers works as expected, no need to become a NixOS user. > Your disagreement represents a niche and if the devs cater to your disagreement then they cater to a small niche. They're catering to the people who are willing to help them create a useful packaging and configuration ecosystem. Just because they're not catering to the end users of those packages doesn't make them insufficiently empathetic. The alternative is a really comfy package manager and a bunch of broken packages. That's much worse. I see NixOS as a factory floor, if you wanna get your hands dirty we'll happily show you around, but the "easy button" experience that we're building happens where people press that button, not where it's made.

corethree 3y ago
Learning nix to help the average user is a bit irrational as both are two opposing objectives. Nix is for power users. Not for average users. It's pretty much the entire design philosophy.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I recently took a computational biology class which was way above my level. There I worked alongside scientists who have some pretty daunting software configuration problems. Their first approach is to just try every package manager that has the tool until they find one that works, and then they tell their peers to use that one. I'm not proposing to teach them to write nix, but they can add it to the list of things they try, like: $ conda install sra-tools ; sra-tools fastq-dump # error: tls version mismatch $ nix build github:MatrixManAtYrService/sra-tools ; ./result/bin/fastq-dump # works I was able to get them unstuck several times by just packaging something myself and pointing them at my repo. That's what I mean by help. Nix packages don't bit rot the way that others do. Packaging things with nix would be a great way to make sure we don't lose access to software that was written in the 80's.

corethree 3y ago

Learning nix to help the average user is a bit irrational as both are two opposing objectives. Nix is for power users. Not for average users. It's pretty much the entire design philosophy.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I recently took a computational biology class which was way above my level. There I worked alongside scientists who have some pretty daunting software configuration problems. Their first approach is to just try every package manager that has the tool until they find one that works, and then they tell their peers to use that one. I'm not proposing to teach them to write nix, but they can add it to the list of things they try, like: $ conda install sra-tools ; sra-tools fastq-dump # error: tls version mismatch $ nix build github:MatrixManAtYrService/sra-tools ; ./result/bin/fastq-dump # works I was able to get them unstuck several times by just packaging something myself and pointing them at my repo. That's what I mean by help. Nix packages don't bit rot the way that others do. Packaging things with nix would be a great way to make sure we don't lose access to software that was written in the 80's.