Comment by pca006132 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pca006132 | Hacker News Reader

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I think nix probably needs a more beginner friendly documentation as well, by beginner friendly I mean Linux beginners. Beginners will not read through nix pills (assuming they can understand it) before trying nix, they will just give up. And there are a lot of Linux users who don't have much technical knowledge about how binaries are being linked, etc.

I think the ecosystem is now mature enough for beginner users to ignore the detailed packaging issues, just rely on home manager and nixos options for most of the setup. And I think it is should be possible to create something like a GUI for home manager, to lower the entry barrier. If people are looking for a distribution rather than a build system, we shouldn't be teaching them how to use nix as a build system, we should show them some config that just works.

Why is it necessary for Nix to be accessible to Linux beginners?

Sure it’d be nice to have, all else being equal, but I don’t see how it helps advance the goals of the project for the people who are using it today.

Because why not? For things like installing (commonly used) packages, setup some services, I think Nix is simpler than things like Debian or Arch. You don't need to understand all the nitty-gritty to install a package. The problem is about the documentation, some information is old (nix-env for example which should be deprecated IMO), may need better discoverability (options that you don't know they even exists), and we should be able to just give some examples for users to modify instead of asking them to learn the whole language.

For advancing the goals of the project, I think increasing adaptation will be beneficial, for example to let more software provide a nix script for building, due to more users using it. And perhaps if more users are using it, more companies and universities will adapt it.

Nix is a programming language and there is no visual editor for it yet.

I think we could do a GUI for a subset; would love to do that someday.

Yes, but for simple usages it is somewhat similar to things like JSON, they don't have to learn a language to install some commonly used packages.

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