thoughts, talks, docs and unpopular opinions

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The author shares their experience of using NixOS, highlighting benefits like declarative configuration, easy service setup, and ephemeral shells. However, they discuss various drawbacks such as version upgrade complexities, community challenges, and high resource use. They conclude that while Nix offers significant advantages, especially for reproducible configurations, it requires a steep learning curve and ongoing maintenance that may not suit all users.

Nix - Death by a thousand cuts

Can you really ever make it to Nix Nirvana?

I can totally get behind the author here. It is really hard to get your systems into that “nix nirvana” state. For most, it is not worth it. For those like me, it is a beautiful candy store filled with hope and wonder. I am one of those people the writer mentioned. I would like to see what the nix 2.0 could possibly become. I feel like this is the closest we have ever been but it is still missing something.
For me I have been using nix for awhile. I carefully crafted and designed my config layouts to make them a flexable as possible. And sticking with the one way todo things (flakes an home manager) it removes a ton of fiction. The main problem with nix is the poor documentation. However, there are many of the community that are trying to close that gap. Without good example or deep knowledge of the language and system it is really easy to create a jumbled mess that you hate.
I use nix on many machines and have only had to write the config once to get it to work on these systems well because everyting I install is a module and I can pick and choose which systems get what. But I know for a fact that my nix box and my mac are both going to have kitty (of ghostty) on them and they are both going to look and function exactly the same.
Even for me there is the occasional headache of a package upgrade, but it is not really a big deal to me to work around.
The main thing that I see with people that come to nix is they don’t/don’t want to shift their thinking completely over to the nix way. it is a go all in type of system. It sounds like the writer embraced the all in system, and still did not enjoy it. I agree with this writers post whole heatedly.
If you are reading this and are on the fence, start your nix journey with it in a VM so you can still work, and then when you go in, go all in. Neovim user? You need to get rid of your plugin managers, and configure your LSPs without things like mason. It really is an all in system. Lazy Nvim package manger is not going to work for you. Convert your nvim config to nix language. Are you a kitty user? Write your kitty config in nix. Don’t try to Frankenstein your config together. It is never a good idea.

Very nice post. I hope the author will find the joy &amp; productivity in NixOS one day. I believe in you &lt;3