8 ms·

I walk away from every article on or attempt to use Nix more mystified

p1necone 1y ago
Yeah Nix seems like an insanely useful concept (declarative, reproducable, diffable, source controllable definitions of linux environments). But actually using it is a nightmare. I think there's some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix that would be useful, I don't know what it is though. Containerization is kinda like this, but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative and I wouldn't really want to use a docker container as my main system environment.
- o11c 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure the best middle ground that currently exists is the various "immutable, snapshot to upgrade" distros out there.
  - pxc 1y ago
    Depends on your use cases. I use Nix all the time at work but I don't use NixOS there at all. (I'd like to, but there are barriers and it's not a priority.) Distros like that don't address my use cases at all.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    Yes and no. It has some of the same advantages, but not the declarative definition of a system. For me (even though I use NixOS the desktop) there is a difference between desktops and servers. I can set up a desktop pretty quickly - install a bunch of flatpaks, checkout a bunch of dotfiles and I don't do it often. Also, popular desktops like Fedora tend to be far more polished than the NixOS desktop, which has all kinds of glitches. Just to name two current ones: (1) gdm login will fail if you are too fast and log in before WiFi is up (usually you are thrown back in gdm, sometimes the session freezes up completly); (2) fwupd firmware updates usually fail. On the other hand, on servers and remote development VMs, the setup work is annoying because I spin up/down machines far more frequently and managing them as pets gets old pretty quickly. So NixOS is much nicer, because you can have a system up and identical in 5 minutes. You could of course approximate it with something like Ansible on non-NixOS. Though, I think the differences will become smaller since Fedora-based immutable systems will switch from OSTree to bootable containers soon [1]. Of course, you can use Nix on another immutable distro than NixOS. [1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/
- chubot 1y ago
  I honestly wonder why there are such divergent opinions between say git and Nix? (I've never used Nix, but I use git all the time) Is Nix so much harder to use than git? git also has a clear model (the Merkle tree of file and directory nodes) but a famously unfriendly UI (git checkout does 5 or more unrelated things) Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day. Why the difference with Nix? Maybe because building packages is inherently slower. Whereas you can quickly get yourself intro trouble with git, but you can also quickly get out of trouble (rm -rf, git clone) Maybe Nix is more stateful? Although the git index/staging area I find to be a fabulously odd piece of state, and honestly breaks all the rules when I think about CLIs Also Nix does rely on a very big global repo, whereas git doesn't It also seems that Nix's model is less clean, and perhaps doesn't match the problem domain as well ... there are disagreements on whether it is "reproducible", etc. Or maybe it's just a harder problem
  - amarshall 1y ago
    Git doesn’t really care at all about the content. Nix does. Really they’re not reasonably comparable at all.
  - pxc 1y ago
    You may not use Nix, but some pretty cool Nix tools use your work. :) Just today I was working on some integrations with a runtime dependency resolver for shell programs that uses OSH for parsing on the job. We use Nix to manage our development environments, and we use it to make some small wrappers and tools written in Bash into something portable and reproducible that we can include in development environments that run both on Linux and macOS. Historically we've just included them inline in our Nix files, but thanks to resholve, we're switching to a nicer system so that they live in separate files that are more pleasant to edit. The "source code" of the scripts lives in the repo as normal bash scripts, but when they get built into the development environment, all command invocations get automatically replaced with hard-coded references to the paths of the relevant executables in the Nix store, the shebang gets pinned to a specific bash version in the same way, and they also get run through ShellCheck. Now we have not only a really nice and quick way to define portable wrappers in our Nix code, but a sane way to manage longer scripts without any portability issues. So thanks for your cool shell and associated tools and libs! > Or maybe it's just a harder problem Fwiw, I think this is true. > Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day. I think one of the other devs on my team probably feels this way. He thinks it's conceptually cool but is somewhat horrified by the complexity and UI. He makes simple uses of it in ways that have precedent on our team, but never really dives in. > Why the difference with Nix? Nix didn't have a celebrity author to spur adoption early on, in some ways it can be slow, and I think maybe it isn't as much better than entrenched alternative stacks than Git was as opposed to SVN. The pain of SVN was very acute for the average developer. I'm not sure that any of the pains of dependency hell, stateful configuration management, distribution of portable executables, etc., are quite as acute for the average operator or developer as that. People who feel Nix makes their professional lives easier tend to have come to it after their career has inflicted more specialized pain upon them. Using Git also doesn't generally (ever?) involve writing code in a Turing-complete language, but to make the best use of Nix, you do have to do that. The paradigm of that language is not very mainstream, either, and although it's generally suited to its domain imo, it certainly has some warts.
- tombert 1y ago
  I run NixOS on every computer I'm allowed to install it and I really don't think it's hard to use, just different. Adapting to a new workflow is hard, but I don't know that NixOS is intrinsically more difficult than any other Linux. I wouldn't want a docker container as my main environment, but I do like having NixOS managing my main environment for a few reasons. First, the declarative nature of everything makes it clear and easy to know what is actually installed on my computer. I can simply look at my configuration file and see if a program is installed, and if it's not. If I want to uninstall something, I delete the program from the configuration.nix and rebuild. This might not seem insignificant, but to me it's game changing. How many times have you uninstalled things in Ubuntu or something and had a ton of lingering transitive dependencies? How many times have you been trying to debug a problem, end up installing a million things, and then painstakingly having to track down every unnecessary dependency and transitive dependency that you ended up installing, only to miss something for months? Maybe most people here are better at this than I am, but these things happened to me all the time. Second, the declarative nature of NixOS makes snapshotting trivial. Again, this is game-changing for me, and it makes fixing stuff on my computer more fun and less scary. If I break something, all I have to do is reboot and choose the last generation, then fix it. This might not seem like a big deal, and again maybe for people smarter than me it's not, but for me it completely changed the way I deal with computers. When I first started using Ubuntu, when I would do something like break the video driver or the WiFi driver, I would end up having to nuke the system and start again, because I would get into a state where I didn't know how to fix it. I probably could fix these things now, I've been doing this stuff for awhile, but even still, it's nice to be able to not ever have to worry about getting into a state like that.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    My biggest gripe with Nix (from real world experience) is that my .nix files randomly break due to changes and I have to spend my time going through Github commits to see what changed in the settings I used to fix it. That and when things do error, the error messages may as well be generated from /dev/random
    - adamtulinius 1y ago
- eru 1y ago
  > [...] but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative [...] The conceptual problem with Docker isn't imperative vs declarative. It's that Docker doesn't even try to be reproducible. Executing the same Dockerfile twice doesn't necessarily build you the same container. (Imperative vs declarative is still an interesting problem to think about, it's just independent of reproducibility in the abstract.)
- darthrupert 1y ago
  I'm also one of the people who have tried Nix(OS) a couple of times and found it too much of a hassle, but nightmare is exaggerating a bit, I feel. Nix's strength and weakness is that it wants to take over everything, and if you want to do something without it, you might be in a world of pain. And after doing more or less standard unixy things for 20+ years, it's difficult to hand over control to a new thing like that.
- xorcist 1y ago
  > some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix That would be configuration management tools such as Salt/Puppet/Ansible/Chef. They were popular ten years ago, and gained a lot of exposure as the devops movement gained ground, but they never stopped being useful. Having your non-running state defined declarative is powerful, and if you can define a single source of truth for entire distributed systems, that suddenly makes you able to reason about state on whole systems.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    What I can't currently figure out with Nix though is how I kill off dependency explosions though. I want to reach into a big tree of derivations and force library and compiler versions to a single common one so we don't, for example, have 6 rust compilers being used.
    - chriswarbo 1y ago
      The usual approach is to give Nixpkgs some `overlays`, which override the attributes you want. This can be handy in conjunction with attributes like `.override`, `.overrideAttrs`, etc. for swapping-out things deeper in the dependency graph. The https://codeberg.org/amjoseph/infuse.nix https://codeberg.org/amjoseph/infuse.nix project looks nice as a way to simplify annoying chains of overrides; though I haven't used it personally.
amarshall 1y ago
For what it’s worth, nothing in this article is really necessarily for general usage of Nix, as the derivation format is mostly abstracted-away, like how the OCI image format is irrelevant to everyday authoring of Dockerfiles.
drowsspa 1y ago
Yeah, it's like those famous posts comparing monads to burritos or something

Yeah Nix seems like an insanely useful concept (declarative, reproducable, diffable, source controllable definitions of linux environments). But actually using it is a nightmare. I think there's some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix that would be useful, I don't know what it is though. Containerization is kinda like this, but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative and I wouldn't really want to use a docker container as my main system environment.

o11c 1y ago
I'm pretty sure the best middle ground that currently exists is the various "immutable, snapshot to upgrade" distros out there.
- pxc 1y ago
  Depends on your use cases. I use Nix all the time at work but I don't use NixOS there at all. (I'd like to, but there are barriers and it's not a priority.) Distros like that don't address my use cases at all.
- microtonal 1y ago
  Yes and no. It has some of the same advantages, but not the declarative definition of a system. For me (even though I use NixOS the desktop) there is a difference between desktops and servers. I can set up a desktop pretty quickly - install a bunch of flatpaks, checkout a bunch of dotfiles and I don't do it often. Also, popular desktops like Fedora tend to be far more polished than the NixOS desktop, which has all kinds of glitches. Just to name two current ones: (1) gdm login will fail if you are too fast and log in before WiFi is up (usually you are thrown back in gdm, sometimes the session freezes up completly); (2) fwupd firmware updates usually fail. On the other hand, on servers and remote development VMs, the setup work is annoying because I spin up/down machines far more frequently and managing them as pets gets old pretty quickly. So NixOS is much nicer, because you can have a system up and identical in 5 minutes. You could of course approximate it with something like Ansible on non-NixOS. Though, I think the differences will become smaller since Fedora-based immutable systems will switch from OSTree to bootable containers soon [1]. Of course, you can use Nix on another immutable distro than NixOS. [1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/getting-started/
chubot 1y ago
I honestly wonder why there are such divergent opinions between say git and Nix? (I've never used Nix, but I use git all the time) Is Nix so much harder to use than git? git also has a clear model (the Merkle tree of file and directory nodes) but a famously unfriendly UI (git checkout does 5 or more unrelated things) Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day. Why the difference with Nix? Maybe because building packages is inherently slower. Whereas you can quickly get yourself intro trouble with git, but you can also quickly get out of trouble (rm -rf, git clone) Maybe Nix is more stateful? Although the git index/staging area I find to be a fabulously odd piece of state, and honestly breaks all the rules when I think about CLIs Also Nix does rely on a very big global repo, whereas git doesn't It also seems that Nix's model is less clean, and perhaps doesn't match the problem domain as well ... there are disagreements on whether it is "reproducible", etc. Or maybe it's just a harder problem
- amarshall 1y ago
  Git doesn’t really care at all about the content. Nix does. Really they’re not reasonably comparable at all.
- pxc 1y ago
  You may not use Nix, but some pretty cool Nix tools use your work. :) Just today I was working on some integrations with a runtime dependency resolver for shell programs that uses OSH for parsing on the job. We use Nix to manage our development environments, and we use it to make some small wrappers and tools written in Bash into something portable and reproducible that we can include in development environments that run both on Linux and macOS. Historically we've just included them inline in our Nix files, but thanks to resholve, we're switching to a nicer system so that they live in separate files that are more pleasant to edit. The "source code" of the scripts lives in the repo as normal bash scripts, but when they get built into the development environment, all command invocations get automatically replaced with hard-coded references to the paths of the relevant executables in the Nix store, the shebang gets pinned to a specific bash version in the same way, and they also get run through ShellCheck. Now we have not only a really nice and quick way to define portable wrappers in our Nix code, but a sane way to manage longer scripts without any portability issues. So thanks for your cool shell and associated tools and libs! > Or maybe it's just a harder problem Fwiw, I think this is true. > Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day. I think one of the other devs on my team probably feels this way. He thinks it's conceptually cool but is somewhat horrified by the complexity and UI. He makes simple uses of it in ways that have precedent on our team, but never really dives in. > Why the difference with Nix? Nix didn't have a celebrity author to spur adoption early on, in some ways it can be slow, and I think maybe it isn't as much better than entrenched alternative stacks than Git was as opposed to SVN. The pain of SVN was very acute for the average developer. I'm not sure that any of the pains of dependency hell, stateful configuration management, distribution of portable executables, etc., are quite as acute for the average operator or developer as that. People who feel Nix makes their professional lives easier tend to have come to it after their career has inflicted more specialized pain upon them. Using Git also doesn't generally (ever?) involve writing code in a Turing-complete language, but to make the best use of Nix, you do have to do that. The paradigm of that language is not very mainstream, either, and although it's generally suited to its domain imo, it certainly has some warts.
tombert 1y ago
I run NixOS on every computer I'm allowed to install it and I really don't think it's hard to use, just different. Adapting to a new workflow is hard, but I don't know that NixOS is intrinsically more difficult than any other Linux. I wouldn't want a docker container as my main environment, but I do like having NixOS managing my main environment for a few reasons. First, the declarative nature of everything makes it clear and easy to know what is actually installed on my computer. I can simply look at my configuration file and see if a program is installed, and if it's not. If I want to uninstall something, I delete the program from the configuration.nix and rebuild. This might not seem insignificant, but to me it's game changing. How many times have you uninstalled things in Ubuntu or something and had a ton of lingering transitive dependencies? How many times have you been trying to debug a problem, end up installing a million things, and then painstakingly having to track down every unnecessary dependency and transitive dependency that you ended up installing, only to miss something for months? Maybe most people here are better at this than I am, but these things happened to me all the time. Second, the declarative nature of NixOS makes snapshotting trivial. Again, this is game-changing for me, and it makes fixing stuff on my computer more fun and less scary. If I break something, all I have to do is reboot and choose the last generation, then fix it. This might not seem like a big deal, and again maybe for people smarter than me it's not, but for me it completely changed the way I deal with computers. When I first started using Ubuntu, when I would do something like break the video driver or the WiFi driver, I would end up having to nuke the system and start again, because I would get into a state where I didn't know how to fix it. I probably could fix these things now, I've been doing this stuff for awhile, but even still, it's nice to be able to not ever have to worry about getting into a state like that.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  My biggest gripe with Nix (from real world experience) is that my .nix files randomly break due to changes and I have to spend my time going through Github commits to see what changed in the settings I used to fix it. That and when things do error, the error messages may as well be generated from /dev/random
  - adamtulinius 1y ago
eru 1y ago
> [...] but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative [...] The conceptual problem with Docker isn't imperative vs declarative. It's that Docker doesn't even try to be reproducible. Executing the same Dockerfile twice doesn't necessarily build you the same container. (Imperative vs declarative is still an interesting problem to think about, it's just independent of reproducibility in the abstract.)
darthrupert 1y ago
I'm also one of the people who have tried Nix(OS) a couple of times and found it too much of a hassle, but nightmare is exaggerating a bit, I feel. Nix's strength and weakness is that it wants to take over everything, and if you want to do something without it, you might be in a world of pain. And after doing more or less standard unixy things for 20+ years, it's difficult to hand over control to a new thing like that.
xorcist 1y ago
> some point on the spectrum between "commit your dotfiles to git" and Nix That would be configuration management tools such as Salt/Puppet/Ansible/Chef. They were popular ten years ago, and gained a lot of exposure as the devops movement gained ground, but they never stopped being useful. Having your non-running state defined declarative is powerful, and if you can define a single source of truth for entire distributed systems, that suddenly makes you able to reason about state on whole systems.
- XorNot 1y ago
  What I can't currently figure out with Nix though is how I kill off dependency explosions though. I want to reach into a big tree of derivations and force library and compiler versions to a single common one so we don't, for example, have 6 rust compilers being used.
  - chriswarbo 1y ago
    The usual approach is to give Nixpkgs some `overlays`, which override the attributes you want. This can be handy in conjunction with attributes like `.override`, `.overrideAttrs`, etc. for swapping-out things deeper in the dependency graph. The https://codeberg.org/amjoseph/infuse.nix https://codeberg.org/amjoseph/infuse.nix project looks nice as a way to simplify annoying chains of overrides; though I haven't used it personally.

amarshall 1y ago

For what it’s worth, nothing in this article is really necessarily for general usage of Nix, as the derivation format is mostly abstracted-away, like how the OCI image format is irrelevant to everyday authoring of Dockerfiles.

drowsspa 1y ago

Yeah, it's like those famous posts comparing monads to burritos or something