Nix is poised to win the future of cloud infrastructure, but critical obstacles remain. A 3-year production story on the promise, the pain, and the concrete path forward for Nix.
I want to be optimistic about nix but the main community on discourse is a travesty. It’s a more a political arena than a coding forum and actively hampers nix development. Any important decision is either made in isolation (a small group of high up people) or on the forums, and the forums are a mined battlefield. Code and words don’t matter, only who wrote or said them.
Nix has had many opportunities to be the basis for something amazing and supported by a large company. Valve could’ve used nix to have dependency locking. Imagine bazzite, the most gamer friendly distro, being built on nix. That would’ve propulsed nix at least onto a mountain to visible to many Linux users.
But if I were Valve and had a single look at the forums and documentation, I too would’ve chosen something else.
I’ll also just mention nix flakes and its experimental yet widespread use with no official documentation or support. Imagine joining and being told to use flakes then being pointed to blog posts from 2019, example repos, and YouTube videos to start using it. That isn’t a good look at all.
Nix has potential but the community squanders it in favor of culture wars, pride, principle, and just anything unrelated to Nix.
Flakes should never have happened the way that they did IMHO. The situation it’s left the project in is awful. It’s stuck. They can’t move forward and accept flakes because they undermine some fundamental things. They can’t move backwards and remove them or even make breaking changes because they’re in such widespread use.
When I looked into nix a year or two ago I was directed to use flakes by half of the documentation while the other half told me to not to use them since they were experimental. Ended up going back to what I knew, since, you know, installing things was a pretty solved problem.
flakes, in the most basic terms, is a solution to “well it works on my machine”.
So say you develop something within a flake, you can then take that flake and reproduce it 100% on whatever machine you choose. so what ever your building in it if it worked on your machine, it’s going to work on all machines.
It’s also good for configuring your NixOS. your configs are within the flake and if something happens to your system or you want to replicate your system completely on another machine you can. i.e. you push your nixos config to a git repo and then you can clone it where ever and now you have your complete OS setup somewhere else. Like say if your system borks and you need to reinstall Arch or Ubuntu or whatever it will take awhile to get it set up completely has you had it before. With NixOS and Flakes it’s like 10minutes tops to get back to where you were.
I want to be optimistic about nix but the main community on discourse is a travesty. It’s a more a political arena than a coding forum and actively hampers nix development. Any important decision is either made in isolation (a small group of high up people) or on the forums, and the forums are a mined battlefield. Code and words don’t matter, only who wrote or said them.
Nix has had many opportunities to be the basis for something amazing and supported by a large company. Valve could’ve used nix to have dependency locking. Imagine bazzite, the most gamer friendly distro, being built on nix. That would’ve propulsed nix at least onto a mountain to visible to many Linux users. But if I were Valve and had a single look at the forums and documentation, I too would’ve chosen something else.
I’ll also just mention nix flakes and its experimental yet widespread use with no official documentation or support. Imagine joining and being told to use flakes then being pointed to blog posts from 2019, example repos, and YouTube videos to start using it. That isn’t a good look at all.
Nix has potential but the community squanders it in favor of culture wars, pride, principle, and just anything unrelated to Nix.
Flakes should never have happened the way that they did IMHO. The situation it’s left the project in is awful. It’s stuck. They can’t move forward and accept flakes because they undermine some fundamental things. They can’t move backwards and remove them or even make breaking changes because they’re in such widespread use.
When I looked into nix a year or two ago I was directed to use flakes by half of the documentation while the other half told me to not to use them since they were experimental. Ended up going back to what I knew, since, you know, installing things was a pretty solved problem.
As someone who hasn’t touch base with Nix for a long time: what are “flakes”?
flakes, in the most basic terms, is a solution to “well it works on my machine”.
So say you develop something within a flake, you can then take that flake and reproduce it 100% on whatever machine you choose. so what ever your building in it if it worked on your machine, it’s going to work on all machines.
It’s also good for configuring your NixOS. your configs are within the flake and if something happens to your system or you want to replicate your system completely on another machine you can. i.e. you push your nixos config to a git repo and then you can clone it where ever and now you have your complete OS setup somewhere else. Like say if your system borks and you need to reinstall Arch or Ubuntu or whatever it will take awhile to get it set up completely has you had it before. With NixOS and Flakes it’s like 10minutes tops to get back to where you were.