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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

• __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.