3 ms·

Augh. Sounds like having NPM as an OS. Absolutely no thanks. I'll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than havin

Augh. Sounds like having NPM as an OS. Absolutely no thanks. I'll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing and having to worry about things I didn't before. If, for whatever reason, I need two disparate versions of something I'll figure it out myself rather than abstracting it away. In my mind, this move seems to be moving from 'high potential energy' to 'low potential energy' where you don't have any room to escape; you have locked yourself at the bottom of a pit and you just have to hope things don't roll over the top because you are at the whims of what NixOS has decided. If you were in a 'high potential energy' situation (ie: Basically any other distro), you would have room to fix it yourself or even take your widely compatible dotfiles and move to a different OS. Even if you are allowed to do configuration outside of NixOS as written, I am going to guess that NixOS isn't a huge fan of it and that configuration is fragile. > However, after using NixOS for a while, I realized this was not true. The abstraction that NixOS packages provide doesn’t hide everything from the user to avoid confusion with irrelevant details. Instead, it offers a way to configure your environment the Nix way, so the resulting configuration files are created by Nix. I'd rather beat my head against a wall for a day figuring out how to configure something than get locked into an OS-specific configuration that I can't move elsewhere. Also when you combine it with this: > The documentation is not in great shape. Absolutely no thanks. You are telling me I have to do things the "NixOS way" but also your documentation is bad / inferior? Absolutely no thanks.

pxc 2y ago
> ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs works. Nixpkgs, the collection of packages that NixOS is built on top of, is a monorepo with only one version of each end user package. There are only multiple versions of a package in a given commit of Nixpkgs if that is necessary to support some other important tuple of packages because they each have a hard dependency on different versions of some package— just like on your typical Linux distro. The ability to have multiple versions of something installed side-by-side comes into play for your own voluntary customizations, and (optionally) for some third-party package sources. Nix doesn't feature other NPM insanity either— there's no network access at bulld time, no circular dependencies, etc.
kugurerdem 2y ago
Liked the 'high potential energy' analogy but I think it misses a point. As far as I know, your Nix knowledge and home-manager configurations are transferrable to MacOS and other Linux distros as well. > I'd rather beat my head against a wall for a day figuring out how to configure something than get locked into an OS-specific configuration that I can't move elsewhere. Many people use Nix and home-manager on their MacOS or non-NixOS Linux setups. You can use Nix package manager without committing yourself to the constraints of NixOS. > You are telling me I have to do things the "NixOS way" but also your documentation is bad / inferior? Absolutely no thanks. Don't know about others but I don't tell you that for sure. I think poor documentation is among the most understandable reasons to NOT use Nix. In the end, I am just trying out things to see whether they benefit me or not. Not here to sell you anything.

pxc 2y ago

> ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs works. Nixpkgs, the collection of packages that NixOS is built on top of, is a monorepo with only one version of each end user package. There are only multiple versions of a package in a given commit of Nixpkgs if that is necessary to support some other important tuple of packages because they each have a hard dependency on different versions of some package— just like on your typical Linux distro. The ability to have multiple versions of something installed side-by-side comes into play for your own voluntary customizations, and (optionally) for some third-party package sources. Nix doesn't feature other NPM insanity either— there's no network access at bulld time, no circular dependencies, etc.

kugurerdem 2y ago

Liked the 'high potential energy' analogy but I think it misses a point. As far as I know, your Nix knowledge and home-manager configurations are transferrable to MacOS and other Linux distros as well. > I'd rather beat my head against a wall for a day figuring out how to configure something than get locked into an OS-specific configuration that I can't move elsewhere. Many people use Nix and home-manager on their MacOS or non-NixOS Linux setups. You can use Nix package manager without committing yourself to the constraints of NixOS. > You are telling me I have to do things the "NixOS way" but also your documentation is bad / inferior? Absolutely no thanks. Don't know about others but I don't tell you that for sure. I think poor documentation is among the most understandable reasons to NOT use Nix. In the end, I am just trying out things to see whether they benefit me or not. Not here to sell you anything.