Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

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> is it the alternative to Debian and Archlinux?

Is it the alternative?

For desktop or server?

NixOS will continue to be niche and continue to be an alternative.

For desktop, NixOS will continue to be a niche, like Arch and Gentoo, because of the learning curve. But if you're already running Arch Linux, NixOS is a step in a direction you do want to consider, but may not want to afford with your time.

For server, NixOS will also continue to be a niche. Using it both attracts talent and limits the talent pool, because lots of very capable DevOps and sysadmins just never got around to NixOS, even if they are veterans in both the classic and the cloud world. It's like making a startup with Haskell.

Also, I've been holding back on switching to NixOS, but I'm finally dedicating my next free weekend to install it on my laptop. I would love to be able to reproduce my exact working environment on new machines more easily. I'm not switching from Debian / Alpine on server any time soon.

> For desktop, NixOS will continue to be a niche, like Arch and Gentoo, because of the learning curve. But if you're already running Arch Linux, NixOS is a step in a direction you do want to consider, but may not want to afford with your time.

It doesn't help that the Nix documentation used to be one of the worst I have ever encountered while Arch and Gentoo have some of the most comprehensive and well written Wikis.

Did it significantly improve in the past two years?

> Did it significantly improve in the past two years?

I feel like I can pretty concretely answer with “no”.

The docs are hard to read and don’t cover content well, and the ecosystem split that flakes brought have made it more complicated than ever for a new user to jump in today.

There’s plenty of user generated content out there. Sometimes it can fill in a gap, but most of the time I find that I have to just figure it out myself.

Nix is a cool system overall but the learning curve still seems needlessly steep.

https://determinate.systems seems to be doing good work for the nix community though. Shout out to them for sure.

> Did [NixOS'es documentation] significantly improve in the past two years?

There has been more blog posts and YouTube learning material on NixOS very recently.

I don't know what happens when you dig deeper than those.

It does require a lot of tinkering.

> Also, I've been holding back on switching to NixOS, but I'm finally dedicating my next free weekend to install it on my laptop.

Good luck and welcome to Nixdom :)

NixOS is a lot of fun even when it doesn't work. It's actually more fun when it's broken haha - Nix has given me the courage to debug some nasty stuff not in my wheelhouse. Thus growing my wheelhouse.

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