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I'm a user of Nix for about seven years and finally decided back in March, during the second rehash of $sponsor controversy, that I'll stop investing and move
by mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
I'm a user of Nix for about seven years and finally decided back in March, during the second rehash of $sponsor controversy, that I'll stop investing and move away from the tech as soon as I have a suitable replacement.
I've been critical of Nix for a variety of reasons along the way but one of those reasons is how so many people (and consultancies) seem hell-bent to set up their own little fiefdoms within the community.
The community is already niche, we certainly didn't need people purposely driving further fragmentation and incompatibility with these frameworks with bad bus factor and NIH designs.
I've seen a lot of tribalism and cargo culting around some of the other efforts in this vein, too.
- esafak 2y agoMoving to what?
- mtndew4brkfst 2y agoUnfortunately still TBD. If I didn't have to support MacOS Guix would be somewhat attractive. I've also come around to enjoying systemd and have an Nvidia GPU in one machine, which are both things Guix doesn't wish to support either. If Nix disappeared overnight I'd probably be using chezmoi to fill in somewhat for Home Manager and mise to fill in somewhat for devShells, and some ansible to try to fill the gaps, and fairly bitter about it. I'm philosophically opposed to containers in the dev feedback loop, as I want native installation and performance for my language toolchains and editor and such.
- jm4 2y agoI’ve noticed the same things, but I think it’s a symptom of Nix being so polarizing in the first place. I can’t think of another piece of software I dislike so much but I’m willing to put up with it because it’s just that good. Like I can’t wait for someone to come up with a better version. I suspect I’m not alone, and it causes some people to try to abstract away all the warts and sharp edges with these frameworks. Ultimately, it probably comes down to project leadership. There doesn’t seem to be a clear vision, consensus or anybody who can do some wrangling to get things going in a direction.
- ilc 2y agoPeople have tried with things like guix and there's a few other Nix spinoffs. The issue is that: Nix/NixOS is here and JUST good enough. So replacing it will be hard. What is come up with has to solve things so much better that the community who has invested in NixOS and others sees enough light that it is worth moving over. That's gonna be rough. Given how hard nix (the language) is to deal with, I won't call it impossible, but... I will say, the successor is more likely to succeed if NixOS totally implodes, and I might go as far as to say... only if it implodes or offers substantial back compatibility so people can migrate.
- generalizations 2y agoAs someone who has been vaguely watching the NixOS ecosystem, but never looked closely enough to see what those sharp edges are - is there a writeup somewhere, maybe a blog post or two, that goes over what's so good and bad about Nix?
- pxc 2y agoIt's not exactly a writeup or review, but Ian Henry's blog series How to Learn Nix captures the surprises, good and bad, that a newbie exploring Nix is likely to encounter. Some of the problems he encounters may be outdated, as Nix and its documentation have both evolved since the start of the series. His experience is also somewhat shaped by his decision to rely solely on the documentation and the software itself for guidance, which he held to for quite a long time-- if you seek help from others earlier on you may get stumped less often. But overall it captures very well what getting to know Nix and its docs is like, including the emotional reactions to sharp edges. https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/ https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/
- mtndew4brkfst 2y agoThe most common critiques I personally see are that the syntax and language is unappealing for many folks, and that the docs are pretty frequently some combination of sparse/haphazard/stale. In my time I very often had to go read raw source to understand how to properly use some less-trivial constructs. I have enough of an FP background to find the language tolerable but not yet pleasant, or even particularly capable. It's absolutely a fair thing to not enjoy. The other major criticism that I think is even more defensible and less subjective is that incremental adoption is not very fun. Many things that are well supported on a mainstream Linux distro will not work OOTB in NixOS until some kind soul contributes the Nix-specific implementation of that thing. In some cases that's not even fundamentally possible. So you run into lots of cases where the first hit on a Google search will solve this thing if you're on Debian, but you're looking at hours of triage to do the same thing on NixOS instead. I have plenty of examples about things that are uniquely possible with NixOS too, but I don't like to evangelize anymore.
- thower34234324 2y agoWhat about GUIX ? I tried using it, but the slow-repos, and weird bugs on my laptop (which needs proprietary blobs) put me off. I very much would prefer using scheme to Nix lang but the eco-system is far smaller.
- mtndew4brkfst 2y agoYeap, proprietary software and firmware are dealbreakers for me too.
- justahuman74 2y agoDo we just need a compromise-happy downstream of guix, much like ubuntu of debian?
- brabel 2y agoI really like the idea and architecture of GUIX and I find it like a better design overall than Nix... but unfortunately, being under the GNU, support for proprietary firmware and Operating Systems (i.e. Mac and Windows) makes it really hard for most of us who are using those systems and don't really feel like running a VM just to use whatever software. I wish they had a separate spinoff that just made sure their software can run on Windows and MacOS, something like exists for emacs, but I think that the challenges are pretty big as they appear to rely on Linux-only APIs?
- KingMob 2y agoThe challenges are more political than technological. They prefer not to compromise their choice to use only Free Software, which is their right, of course. However, I've run into a GUIX person or two who frame it as a technical issue because something like macOS lacks a completely verifiable build chain (i.e., needing to use XCode to bootstrap). This is a factual statement, but not the real reason why support for macos/windows is absent.
- rekado 2y agoWhat is the real reason then? Please enlighten me, because I have been blocked by these technical issues in my past attempts to bring Guix to macOS. Guix is built around glibc and there is no glibc port for macOS. Using XCode for everything is like replacing a bicycle drive train with a steam engine; I guess it's still a vehicle of some sort, but Theseus is still unhappy with his new ship. You can use Guix on macOS with https://superkamiguru.org/projects/msg.html https://superkamiguru.org/projects/msg.html, but it's probably not what people want when they ask for macOS support.
- bsimpson 2y agoI believe Snowflake is one of Jake Hamilton's projects. He's trying to make Nix more approachable through GUI tools etc. Unfortunately, he's also part of the mob that chased the founder out of the Nix project and decided it should be yet another battleground for identity politics. Like you, seeing the community entertain these stupid political fiefdoms makes me want nothing to do with NixOS. However, I might stick with it out of laziness though until SteamOS runs on 3rd party hardware. The Jovian project is a Nix-based SteamOS clone that's been working well on my Legion Go, and I don't want to spend the time back in tinkerland finding something to replace it.
- ParetoOptimal 2y ago[flagged]
- mongol 2y agoThank you for illustrating the problem with the Nix community so succintly. When someone brings up those words, I know immediately to distance myself from them.
- darthrupert 2y agoIf they don't like fascists, why are they against the only serious anti-fascist force on this planet?
- heisnotanalien 2y agoI don't know much about the project but as an outsider it all just seems totally insane! People writing letters with screenshots of actions really? Liking a post becomes the equivalent to going on a political march or something? I can't help wonder if a lot of these problems would be avoided by more collaborative in person/talking and frankly more emotional awareness. It's all cognitive left-brain stuff - where is the emotional centre?
- AJRF 2y ago> I'm a user of Nix for about seven years and finally decided back in March, during the second rehash of $sponsor controversy, that I'll stop investing and move away from the tech as soon as I have a suitable replacement. Same for me. We were exploring the use of it across our company for doing the building part of our containers, but the seeping in of identity politics made me rip the whole initiative up, it's simply too risky as you can see very likely paths towards fragmentation and disruption if you use this tech. Such a shame.