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> things become easier I'm not even sure what that would look like. Nix is such a departure from other Linuxen that I don't think it will magically become eas

> things become easier I'm not even sure what that would look like. Nix is such a departure from other Linuxen that I don't think it will magically become easier; I expect you'll always need to understand Nix to use it. Maybe better syntax highlighting etc. would help? I expect it's much easier to learn Nix in the age of LLMs than it would have been before.

k8svet 2y ago
There are multiple competent LSP implementation for nix so hopefully that's not the blocker! Nix has rough to pick up, but has a comfort to it once you broach it.
rav3ndust 2y ago
i haven't had a chance to have a play with the alpha yet, but there is a project that is working on making nix "easier" for beginners. its called snowflakeOS: https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/
- bsimpson 2y ago
  There was a bunch of recent drama surrounding a woke takeover and/or fork of the Nix ecosystem. Browse /r/NixOS if you want details. I haven't followed it closely and I don't want to misrepresent, but as I understand: - They pushed the founder of the project out of the BDFL role he'd held for 21 years, and - They started a new "governance" process that included evicting people who disagreed with their tack/tact. It was done in the name of "inclusivity," but it sounds like the bar for excluding people they disagreed with was very low. The Snowflake guy (Jake Hamilton) is part of the takeover crew. He's got a fork in-waiting if the takeover of mainline Nix doesn't go the way they want: https://aux.computer/ https://aux.computer/
  - rav3ndust 2y ago
    thanks for the info! i had heard about some drama in nixworld, but hadn't done much reading into it yet. this is a good starting point.
  - lambdanil 2y ago
    That is a rather biased interpretation of events. The controversy started with questionable sponsorship decisions for NixCon, which brought the entire project leadership under scrutiny as it wasn't the first time this had happened. This, along with some more long-term issues contributed to the creation of an open letter[^1] criticizing the BDFL of Nix. How valid you consider the criticisms is not for me to decide, but I don't think dismissively reducing the issue to a "woke takeover" is helpful. [1] https://save-nix-together.org/ https://save-nix-together.org/
_lvbh 2y ago
Documentation!
qw3rty01 2y ago
as someone who has been working to make nix my main system for several months now, there are some very clear areas of improvement that would make things easier: - [any] documentation, the majority of nix modules are undocumented and so the only way to figure out what settings are available is to find and read the source code (and even then it could be using a module to convert the definitions to the target config format, in which case there’s even more guessing, but at least the official documentation of that package gives you something) - coding standards; lots of modules have different variations of camel case, snake case, adjective-noun, noun-adjective, etc so it’s not clear what the correct format of a setting is for an arbitrary package - flakes just need to be both an official feature and set to be the default way to interact with nix, it just has too many upsides - Better errors, the current errors are just horrible to read and you end up picking out 1 or 2 spots in several paragraphs of irrelevant code snippets and stack traces - up to date resources, since the official docs aren’t very beginner friendly, third party resources end up being the way people learn (vimjoyer has been a godsend), but half the time when you try to use those resources, they’re out of date and lead to broken nix configs, having solid official updated documentation to help new users get started in nix would go a long way here
- techdragon 2y ago
  Seriously… flakes are still “experimental”… come on… this is starting to look bad at this point… I have been refusing to get onboard while the entire community’s preferred methods are “experimental”… I don’t want to base my entire OS install on experimental features… The flakes situation felt like the sort of thing that the next major release would have finally solved… it’s absolutely baffling to me that this is still not offical and enabled by default… I haven’t seen any new decent documentation in over year that doesn’t use flakes.
  - hammyhavoc 2y ago
    Pull requests welcome?
- nerdix 2y ago
  nix flake update then nixos-rebuild switch --flake and encountering an error is nightmare fuel. There is always a moment right after the error occurs where it feels like you'll never figure it out. I've always manage to up to this point but man...
hammyhavoc 2y ago
ChatGPT generates some complete dogshit in terms of Nix configs. Rather than waste time and valuable electricity and water on LLM prompts with poor results, just read the docs and learn. It'll be faster—I promise.

k8svet 2y ago

There are multiple competent LSP implementation for nix so hopefully that's not the blocker! Nix has rough to pick up, but has a comfort to it once you broach it.

rav3ndust 2y ago

i haven't had a chance to have a play with the alpha yet, but there is a project that is working on making nix "easier" for beginners. its called snowflakeOS: https://snowflakeos.org/ https://snowflakeos.org/

bsimpson 2y ago
There was a bunch of recent drama surrounding a woke takeover and/or fork of the Nix ecosystem. Browse /r/NixOS if you want details. I haven't followed it closely and I don't want to misrepresent, but as I understand: - They pushed the founder of the project out of the BDFL role he'd held for 21 years, and - They started a new "governance" process that included evicting people who disagreed with their tack/tact. It was done in the name of "inclusivity," but it sounds like the bar for excluding people they disagreed with was very low. The Snowflake guy (Jake Hamilton) is part of the takeover crew. He's got a fork in-waiting if the takeover of mainline Nix doesn't go the way they want: https://aux.computer/ https://aux.computer/
- rav3ndust 2y ago
  thanks for the info! i had heard about some drama in nixworld, but hadn't done much reading into it yet. this is a good starting point.
- lambdanil 2y ago
  That is a rather biased interpretation of events. The controversy started with questionable sponsorship decisions for NixCon, which brought the entire project leadership under scrutiny as it wasn't the first time this had happened. This, along with some more long-term issues contributed to the creation of an open letter[^1] criticizing the BDFL of Nix. How valid you consider the criticisms is not for me to decide, but I don't think dismissively reducing the issue to a "woke takeover" is helpful. [1] https://save-nix-together.org/ https://save-nix-together.org/

_lvbh 2y ago

Documentation!

qw3rty01 2y ago

as someone who has been working to make nix my main system for several months now, there are some very clear areas of improvement that would make things easier: - [any] documentation, the majority of nix modules are undocumented and so the only way to figure out what settings are available is to find and read the source code (and even then it could be using a module to convert the definitions to the target config format, in which case there’s even more guessing, but at least the official documentation of that package gives you something) - coding standards; lots of modules have different variations of camel case, snake case, adjective-noun, noun-adjective, etc so it’s not clear what the correct format of a setting is for an arbitrary package - flakes just need to be both an official feature and set to be the default way to interact with nix, it just has too many upsides - Better errors, the current errors are just horrible to read and you end up picking out 1 or 2 spots in several paragraphs of irrelevant code snippets and stack traces - up to date resources, since the official docs aren’t very beginner friendly, third party resources end up being the way people learn (vimjoyer has been a godsend), but half the time when you try to use those resources, they’re out of date and lead to broken nix configs, having solid official updated documentation to help new users get started in nix would go a long way here

techdragon 2y ago
Seriously… flakes are still “experimental”… come on… this is starting to look bad at this point… I have been refusing to get onboard while the entire community’s preferred methods are “experimental”… I don’t want to base my entire OS install on experimental features… The flakes situation felt like the sort of thing that the next major release would have finally solved… it’s absolutely baffling to me that this is still not offical and enabled by default… I haven’t seen any new decent documentation in over year that doesn’t use flakes.
- hammyhavoc 2y ago
  Pull requests welcome?
nerdix 2y ago
nix flake update then nixos-rebuild switch --flake and encountering an error is nightmare fuel. There is always a moment right after the error occurs where it feels like you'll never figure it out. I've always manage to up to this point but man...

hammyhavoc 2y ago

ChatGPT generates some complete dogshit in terms of Nix configs. Rather than waste time and valuable electricity and water on LLM prompts with poor results, just read the docs and learn. It'll be faster—I promise.