Not because it's suddenly got better, but because the learning curve has collapsed to a flat line. My problem with linux has always been how un-user friendly it is. Constant tinkering around with config files and googling how to fix problems. Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.
There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.
I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.
But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.
I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.
That said: the main fear here probably comes from the enormous size of nixpkgs and the overall cost of the infrastructure. Most individual package definitions should be relatively easy to maintain. So perhaps it isn’t such a big deal, if Nix infra built packages more slowly and reduced the scope of the repo then it could probably cope with having fewer maintainer hours available and less funding.
Still, something about it feels like a Tower of Babel situation. It goes just far enough beyond most people’s understanding to feel like it has fractal complexity. (Although it really isn’t that bad once you’ve spent enough time with it.)
These days I am more interested in simple, self-contained systems like OpenBSD than impressive feats of engineering. I still prefer Nix for most “work stuff”.
there are some bad things, but there is nix language version which fixes edge cases.
nickel as language seems good alternative for nix btw.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747
c.f.,
http://literateprogramming.com/
Last month I bought a flet.dev subscription (and tokens 3 times over --- the recent update seems to be far more efficient in terms of what one gets for a given token spend?) and have been using it to try to make some small apps for CNC work and I am currently dismantling one based on converting the generated .md documentation and re-writing it with the source code inserted at appropriate places and with added commentary and documentation and links --- I'm confident that when I'm done I'll have a tool which I understand and which if need be, could be re-created w/o AI help, or ported to some different UI toolkit/build system.
That being said, having worked on guix packages. Automated conversation is not so simple. The bottleneck for me is compilation time and cost. even with superdooper intelligence, you have to trial and error builds, fix mysterious test race conditions and match versions.
A powerful $5000 build server plus another several thousand per year for The electricity cost would go a long way to speeding up this process. Old second hand computers are not viable because the electricity cost for constantly building software on them is not cost effective.
It makes me kinda buthurt when some racist rich people can raise millions for some crappy arch skin distro soft fork, but serious, novel, from the ground up projects have to scratch around in the dirt for pennies. The project may not have truly demonstrated it's worth to justify replacing nix, but I feel it's unique and special enough that it is deserving of some money falling from the sky. It's 1 of only 2 of this style of functional packaging distribution.
That said, it has a problem with 'rootedness' as in 'what is the root of this attribute string'.
Firstly, 'with' keyword allows you to silently slice off the front end when the attribute string originates from a passed-in argument variable.
Secondly, when you arrive at foo in foo.bar, you have no concept of what the ancestor path looks like; someone is going to do an import of this file, likely store it in a named variable in the context it is needed, and then dispose it. Every time we need foo, it's being referenced from some ephemeral external context. So it's impossible to say or know "foo has 5 references" via static analysis unless we are just grepping it.
Thirdly, (related to above), when you declare services.tailscale.enable = true; you are relying on some ephemeral other location to find meaning in services-dot as declared in the current file. Metaphorically, we can't actually turn and face upstream looking up the call stack to easily see how we arrived (nor how many times we expect to arrive) at this site.
'Self' in the context of flakes is another great example of emphemeral-ness and non-discoverability...what is accessible under 'self'? It takes a PHD to describe it.
Allowing strings mixed in (foo.bar."baz".biz) and the expectation that you might be interpolating (foo.bar."${baz}".biz) is a whole nother ball of wax...
I can confirm all of your comments, and someone will come up with something similar that's easier on the eyes.
i realised long ago this is usually a self-inflicted problem. Some of us (myself included) cannot resist tinkering with something that works reasonably well. When we use Windows its hard to tinker so we leave well along. Linux lets you tinker so we keep trying to reach perfection, and that breaks stuff.
Claude has definitely helped to reduce this negative!
The worst my family have had was an MS surface running a rolling release distro because it was the only way to get the touchscreen working which failed at a bad time. Now switched to a more stable distro and looks OK.
On the other hand most laptops and all desktops have been trouble free. Even running a rolling release distro (Manjaro) has been fine on a laptop that was designed for Linux (and sold with Linux preinstalled).
I tinker with one ARM based tablet, which never works quite right but because its a secondary device with limited use anyway its not a problem. My work laptop does not get messed around with unless necessary.
Some of it is real pain points, and those are annoying that they aren't baked into the distro from the beginning.
I think that tinkering serves a purpose. If you don't fully understand your tooling, you won't be able to fix it when something breaks. Tinkering teaches you that.
Also, you might miss out on improved workflow by leaving things alone.
The whole reason I use FOSS is that I don't some big tech architect to decide for me how my computer should work.
I also find the people developing FOSS give me more choices and my computer works closer to what I want by default.
For example, in 1996 I tweaked the buttons on Total Commander's main button bar (was called Windows Commander back then). I still use that same button bar today, 30 years later. Only some icons had to be replaced. I try to do the same in Linux, but...
There are some programs where this just doesn't work. Firefox for example has a bad habit of deprecating settings and adding new ones (with wrong defaults, because... money probably). It needs tinkering all the time.
If I have issue with nixos, its 99 out of 100 times going to be package I pulled either from nixpkgs-unstable or 3d party flake.
NixOS make it less of a problem because I can alwasy switch to previous generation and build all of my hosts before switching any of them.
Some distros are worse then others though. Ubuntu (used to?) for some reasons loved switching nvidia drivers OSS version that does not work every update or break keyboard layout switcher. I never had such issues with NixOS, but with NixOS I have "kernel updated, reboot required" issue that I had setup alert for[1].
[1]: Only issue on a host that has nvidia card because nvidia being nvidia.
What does this have to do with Nix, though? If you’re using an LLM to run everything, you don’t even need as many layers of abstractions or tools.
Compared to poking at a mungy ball of accidental state where every change introduces complexity for the future which every downstream agent needs to correctly find.
And likewise if theres an issue then its much more straightforward for it to unwind what it did in nixos vs a traditional software install and not accidentally mess with other users/services on the system.
I remember trying to remap keys in Linux Mint and install Chinese language keyboard were both major PITA requiring Claude/ChatGPT, while on Windows I could do it without any help in few minutes (the keyboard in seconds)
I wouldn't be surprised if it could better deal with Linux issues than Linus.
What could possibly go wrong.
MiniPC network device doesn't have a Linux driver. At all. Had to get a vibe-coded, reverse engineered one. This was a first for me.
NAS (ugreen) was a pain in the ass to install my own OS on (I didn't trust theirs, wanted OpenSUSE, and had to get a reverse engineered LED controller driver so I could display hard drive health)
ASUS Laptop will not sleep properly, and would drain the battery flat in a day or do. Myself & Claude gave up after days of trying various tricks workarounds (up to BIOS hacks). The best I can do is hibernate (after about 5 minutes of sleep) but man, the hacky bullshit required to get there was incredible.
Different laptop sleeps fine but will not, under any circumstances, hibernate. Even though I have all the crazy tricks up my sleeve from the ASUS that won't sleep properly and needs to hibernate. Different hardware, totally different bullshit problems.
And then I recently got an Macbook M1 Max for local LLM hacking and everything just fucking works. I don't like MacOS but the hardware is amazing and the OS just fucking works with it (and I like that).
Almost 10 months on Fedora Asahi, so somewhat experimental platform, and had very little issues, nearly none.
It can be clunky at times but I have no regrets. I’m now toying with the idea of multi-booting with Silverblue or a derivative, and guess what? I actually can do that if I want.