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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's very perfect at all. It clearly appeals strongly to people managing cloud servers because it's basically the same kind of technology as Ansible or the many alternatives. Makes sense to use the same kind of tech you know through and through on your desktop as well.

To me personally it doesn't really have much appeal.. Being able to replicate my desktop from scratch is not something I need often. And when I need to make a config change I don't want to bundle that with a package upgrade.

Even for my servers I don't subscribe to the "cattle not pets" ideology.

I just mean to say it's close to perfect for its target userbase. But different ones exist and this seems to often be forgotten by Nix evangelists. It's a good tool for some jobs but not for all.

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I probably appeals most to developers as sharing application development environments with shell nix files is totally awesome.

I must say that using nix on my primary workstation makes it feel like an appliance. The system generation roll-back have saved me a lot of times when an application update brings a regression.

That makes sense, I never need to share my config with anyone else.

Also I love the ability to mix packages with source compiled software, which is one of the reasons I use FreeBSD on my primary desktop. It does that combo really well with its ports collection.

I feel like FreeBSD is almost this middle ground between a typical package managed (?) system and something like Nix. I didn't wind up needing that middle ground, but just the few months I spent with it made it clear how well-designed it is. Only on Nix have I written and modified my own packages that much, and that's partly out of necessity.

That's true actually, the rc.conf file is a little bit Nix-like. It's basically a single file for all your configuration. Never thought of it that way.

Many applications don't obey it though. Makes sense because they'd have to make code specifically for FreeBSD and its marketshare is tiny.

> It clearly appeals strongly to people managing cloud servers I manage cloud servers, on-prem servers etc. and I don't want to deal with Nix/NixOS.

> it's basically the same kind of technology as Ansible or the many alternatives It's not Ansible because Ansible cannot guarantee state convergence.

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