I came to the same conclusion. If I have a problem that I know nixos can solve it's useful tool in my belt. But man you try to do anything out side the box the learning curve is massive. Good for those that know but when you only get to tinker a few times a week for a couple hours just getting things to work can be fun at first but gets old very quick.
- Okay sure, but that's like trying to use iOS and then saying it's too restrictive. NixOS is pretty clear on what it offers and what it can do.
It would seem that Nix has succumbed in this case to its Archenemy.
- groan
I read the article, this is not the first time that people think of Nix/NixOS like so. Its a standard case of wanting to use Nix ecosystem to the fullest, but you do not need to. You need to find the balance for yourself and that is different from person to person. I am using NixOs for about 9 years, and in whole that time I have never felt overwhelmed. People are just different.
😁 Arch for the win
- Ok, so preface: this isn't about you. Your comment just coalesced something I've been ruminating about recently.
  I wish we, as humans, didn't have this knee-jerk tenancy to make everything a zero-sum competition. Vi vs EMACS. x86 vs ARM. Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs FreeBSD. C vs Go vs Rust vs Clojure vs JavaScript. Arch vs the world.
  It really is a zero-sum game, with real consequences. If your favorite distro becomes unpopular enough, it might die, and then you have to give up something you love. Windows winning the OS market for decades meant countless people had to suffer using Windows because the company they worked for mandated it. If I crusade for V(lang) enough, it might become popular enough for jobs to open for it.
  The downside is that we're constantly fighting against diversity, and that's bad.
  I suffer from this as much as anyone, and I hate that my first impulse is to either tear down "the opposition", which at some point is nearly everyone, or schadenfreude.
  "It is not enough that I succeed, but that others should fail." It can't be healthy.
  
  I feel we've identified a problem quite well, but I'm at more of a loss for a solution-oriented perspective? And also, VI x86 and Gentoo for life!
  
  You are absolutely right 😇
Because reading the docs is too hard for an imbecile?
- My personal nixos config
  dude, I learned and used NixOS for 2 years and I found it incredibly challenging as some of the documentation is fragmented to the point where you have to delve into several hundreds of others configurations to fix singular problems. Some issues are actually impossible to solve (unless you have months of time off and proficiency with Nix) as NixOS is not FHS compliant.
  In addition, good luck with finding what you want as sometimes it's unsearchable as the devs decided not to distinguish the 3 from each other.
  Why? I have no idea.
  I haven't even mentioned Nix Flakes which is it's own level of complexity due to it's experimental but recommended status by the community.
  Perhaps it's a skill issue but I feel that I've spent my 2 years of due diligence to know that it's still quite rough on the edges.
  At this point I'm personally moving back to Arch.
  I'll be experimenting with Gentoo sometime in the near future but at this point it's very unlikely I'll ever revisit Nix and NixOS especially since Valve is doing fantastic work in collaboaration with the Arch Linux devs.
  For all I've said above
  Because reading the docs is too hard for an imbecile?
  Please reconsider before posting future antagonistic and abbrasive comments as it does no favors to you nor the community and only paints a target on your back👍
  Nix and NixOS are not easy beasts to tame as advanced help is sparce and individual challenges can be quite niche such that help cannot be readily found.
  
  ## Windows emulator. bottles wine winetricks
  Wine Is Not an Emulator! 😀
  
  I’ve been using Nix for well over a decade and yes it’s fucking hard, sometimes. But when it’s hard it’s usually solvable by using the repl so you can actually see what’s happening.
  
  I agree completely, I still think that for some things Nix is the most convenient thing, e.g. when packaging cross-compiled images of the apps, but I would never be able to build this from ground up, and whenever something breaks it's a pain to fix. Using NixOS on Mac at least taught me how it works more or less, and it mostly does except for when it doesn't and I'm in it deep
- I'm gonna be honest, I use NixOS, but the docs fucking suck, and a number of things are just broken in nixpkgs. For instance, I recently discovered the structuredExtraConfig option for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options, which means some kernel patches won't work unless you manually supply the entire kernel config.
  EDIT: what's even more annoying about it not working is that it fails to apply silently. In other words, your kernel tries to compile and then an hour later it fails because your config changes weren't applied.
  
  An hour? Are you on a pentium4? I’m building everything from source, daily, multiple times and the longest it takes is usually 1.5hours for a complete build of Gnome, Firefox, Nvidia+Kernel. And that’s only if I don’t update for like a month. But just a kernel build, that should only take a min or two.
  
  For instance, I recently discovered the structuredExtraConfig option for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options
  From reading, I thought this option was for adding options, not removing them. Sure, you might be able to set options to "no", but I don't think this will override the defaults...
- If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner's manual for every car you've owned? If you're a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?
  At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don't need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.
  
  I suspect this attitude of “read the fucken manuel” comes from when tooling was simpler and you could actually read all the manuals (or buy a book) to learn every small bit of it. Today, I’d be surprised if someone actually read all the Windows, .Net, and Powershell docs before attempting to write a small script.
  Heck, even simpler things like Python have massive docs beneath every layer of them. You don’t learn everything from the ground up anymore, only the relevant parts to your use case.
- I cannot speak on behalf of the article author, but as someone who personally is an imbecile, the answer is: definitely!

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