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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I've only used NixOS, but the Containerfile looks more like a shell script than a Nix config:

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile

    AS incomprehensible && \
       as nix can be && \
       i would take it && \
       any day over && \
       configuring a desktop OS && \
       with the horrible && \
       Dockerfile syntax

Containerfile is just what the IBM containers group calls a Dockerfile. They are 99% compatible.

That looks like something I wouldn't wanna use, all imperative

Same. I can't be the only one who feels that Nix is doing the right thing the wrong way. The right thing being reproducible, declarative, composable environments; the wrong thing being its language and tooling. Too often I feel like serious Nix users spend a distressing amount of time manually doing package manager tasks, so the way forward is to stop doing exactly that. Going back to imperative composition is a step backward that will never help people free up time away from package management.

FWIW I am starting to use home manager on my new macOS workstation, and I haven't had to dig too deep into Nix, nixpkgs, or NixOS.

I might hit limits soon as I rice my neovim install.

Make sure to have a look at nixvim: https://github.com/nix-community/nixvim

I wish guix was a little more mainstream.

The language is just JSON with functions. It's actually so nice to write configurations in that I wish it was more easier to use as a standalone thing.

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