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throwaway894345HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I'm a big believer in Nix's high-level approach to declarative systems, but the whole UX of Nix is …

… I'm a big believer in Nix's high-level approach to declarative systems, but the whole UX of Nix is so poor that foregoing declarative systems altogether is quite a lot less painful than using Nix in my experience. I'm rooting for it, but it really feels like Nix needs a product manager or something (no disrespect to the maintainers; these are difficult problems and I'm sure I wouldn't do a very good job). New users should beware.

Original discussionZero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix225 source comments · at import
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FL
flexiondotorgHN

Closing in on 20 years of existence doesn't really qualify for fad I'm just starting a serious learning journey with Nix after flirting with the idea for a few years. Mostly because I find myself endlessly working on tooling to support the projects I work on that Nix already does extremely well. The feature I am most sold on is the ability to invoke clean complex development environments, that bring themselves to existence automatically as I traverse directories. If you work in code or in DevOps, Nix is totally worth a look.

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RG
rgoulterHN

> MacOS is still a second-class citizen in the Nix world and a fair amount of stuff doesn't work properly In my experience: With fewer nix users on macOS, it's more likely you'll run into software which isn't in the binary cache, & so will compile from source. (brew also does this). With fewer nix users on macOS, it's may take longer for packages broken on macOS to be fixed. It's a bit more of a hurdle to use .app programs out-of-the-box compared to brew, due to the symlinking.

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PX
pxcHN

I feel like Nix is worth it for me at this point, but I've definitely been through some of the pain described. This is a tough critique to hear for anyone who loves the project but I agree with the core of it (except the syntax issue). Worth reading for Nix people and prospective Nix users alike, imo.

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SU
SuperSandro2000HN

> MacOS is still a second-class citizen in the Nix world and a fair amount of stuff doesn't work properly and that will stay this way if Apple continues to make major and breaking changes with every update and changing MacOS more and more away from a BSD system and locking it further down.

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