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I wish Nix had a shallower learning curve (or that I was smarter). It's been on my list of wishes to play with, but that list is long, and getting Nix over the

I wish Nix had a shallower learning curve (or that I was smarter). It's been on my list of wishes to play with, but that list is long, and getting Nix over the hump hasn't been something I've been able to do yet. The concept makes sense to me, but when I see a new package or app I want to play with, I can get there with docker-compose and a VM more quickly than I can wrap my head around doing it in Nix.

AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
If you get the base system up you don't have to exclusively use their containerization system. I have a mix of nix environments and k3s deployments that are saved off in another git repo. There are advantages to purity but practically speaking you can just do what's convenient.
JamesSwift 3y ago
Its just a matter of repetition. It will eventually click if you go back enough times (at least it did for me after like 4 tries). The biggest thing to getting your mind adjusted to the syntax is to understand that nix is just 1 big JSON blob. All the syntax is there to facilitate merging/updating that ball of JSON in a deterministic way. You might try to generate your docker containers using nix as a first step. Not sure if it will be more approachable for you, but at least its 1 less new thing to adjust to.
haswell 3y ago
I’m going through the NixOS journey right now, and it’s a combination of easier than I thought, but also more frustrating than it should be. Getting a basic system going seemed about as easy as Arch (if you consider Arch easy). But adding flakes and home manager to the mix is where things have run off the rails a bit for me. I think a lot of the steepness of the learning curve comes from trying to go all in on flakes/home manager up front, and a lot of the online discussions and quick starts being oriented towards this goal. I’ve since scaled back my aspirations a bit and I’m focusing on just understand core NixOS with a monolithic config file until it makes more sense to my brain. If you haven’t get, check out vimjoyer’s channel on YouTube. His content has been the most helpful for me by far, and it got me a basic setup going that I’m now iterating on. What I do love is that I feel like I can iterate with confidence. I have no idea what I’m doing for the most part but I know I can get myself back to a working state. I think it will be worth the time investment in the long run, but yeah, it’s been a bit weird and the lack of a canonical approach makes it hard to break into the ecosystem.

AnarchismIsCool 3y ago

If you get the base system up you don't have to exclusively use their containerization system. I have a mix of nix environments and k3s deployments that are saved off in another git repo. There are advantages to purity but practically speaking you can just do what's convenient.

JamesSwift 3y ago

Its just a matter of repetition. It will eventually click if you go back enough times (at least it did for me after like 4 tries). The biggest thing to getting your mind adjusted to the syntax is to understand that nix is just 1 big JSON blob. All the syntax is there to facilitate merging/updating that ball of JSON in a deterministic way. You might try to generate your docker containers using nix as a first step. Not sure if it will be more approachable for you, but at least its 1 less new thing to adjust to.

haswell 3y ago

I’m going through the NixOS journey right now, and it’s a combination of easier than I thought, but also more frustrating than it should be. Getting a basic system going seemed about as easy as Arch (if you consider Arch easy). But adding flakes and home manager to the mix is where things have run off the rails a bit for me. I think a lot of the steepness of the learning curve comes from trying to go all in on flakes/home manager up front, and a lot of the online discussions and quick starts being oriented towards this goal. I’ve since scaled back my aspirations a bit and I’m focusing on just understand core NixOS with a monolithic config file until it makes more sense to my brain. If you haven’t get, check out vimjoyer’s channel on YouTube. His content has been the most helpful for me by far, and it got me a basic setup going that I’m now iterating on. What I do love is that I feel like I can iterate with confidence. I have no idea what I’m doing for the most part but I know I can get myself back to a working state. I think it will be worth the time investment in the long run, but yeah, it’s been a bit weird and the lack of a canonical approach makes it hard to break into the ecosystem.