NixOS is interesting, but has fatal flaws

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[aurorapaisley]

My favourite part is when they talked about the fatal flaws of NixOS

[mechanicalmonk]

I want my 61 seconds back.

Such a vacuous video.

[pattmayne]

So... the fatal flaw is that it's awesome?

[_modiX]

I spend the last few days with NixOS and tried setup up using a minimal environment with Nix Flakes and their home-manager. It worked out not bad, until I had to fetch and compile a git repo with a Makefile that wanted absolute paths. I dig deeper and it seems, as soon as something isn't packed for Nix, and you have to patch and pack on your own, it's a ton of work, because you often have to modify or wrap applications to make dependencies work at runtime, etc. This makes it hard to use for a daily driver where often is not much time to setup a dev environment. I really like the idea of it being fully collision-free, but the time it wastes is astronomical. However, as soon as you get it and require only stuff that is provided already, it's not a bad experience, because you cannot run into collisions.

[zyansheep]

Since when was nix ever a replacement for docker or wasm? nix is a reproducible *build system*, not so much for virtualization or sandboxing. In fact, you can even build docker containers or compile wasm executables using nix!
If there was a fatal flaw for nix it would be the lack of ease of use for the average user. The language is surprisingly hard to grasp (not to even mention the terrible API docs). The tooling is pretty sub-par and not entirely thought out. These issues make Nix hard to get into for anyone looking in from the outside.
Also there are smaller issues like POSIX incompatability, dependency duplication, flakes are slow, etc.. but those can be worked around / managed.

But even with all those issues, I still use Nix as a developer solely because of its reproducibility. Never again will I have to hunt around for exactly the right version of this package or that package to install as dependencies for each individual project I work on, or go through the copious amounts of manual configuration needed when installing linux on a new computer...

[jotix]

WoW this individual compares a declarative and reproducible OS with some container... he has no idea about anything... it's only a really stupid and unfundamented opinion

[psij]

It's interesting that they think Docker is somehow a replacement for a declarative and reproducible operating system.

Nix is the new Arch. Except it's also the new Debian.

[alinayossimouse]

What is this comparing Nix to Docker? I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding either of what Nix or what Docker is.

[NonLogicalDev]

Few flaws I have discovered:
* it is very easy to accidentally cause a full dir copy to the store, without even noticing, and store is world readable, so be real careful with your secrets
* nix eval is single threaded, and is sadly quite slow nowadays, really waiting for the multithread eval to land someday
* better support for developer environments would come a long way, nix develop is ok, but it was not really designed to be used this way

[paimonbutter]

The fatal flaw in my opinion isn't a design flaw but a unfortunate reality, that since nixos is different from everything else it doesn't follow the standard structure for a linux system making some things harder, for example not being able to run ELF files directly or even appimages directly because of dynamically linked libraries not being where they are expected to be.

[jimmyneutron]

what fatal flaws? i just saw this stuff, i don't know anything about this OS, this video is completely unhelpful

[llpolluxll]

Please explain to me what nix has to do with docker. It's not like you can't run container software like docker or flatpak on nix.

[BraxtonMeyer]

it's funny how they think docker won.

[jerrygreenest]

Well, I think they well listed all the fatal flaws here

[xrn]

The future was a reality, I'm pretty sure the Russians were using analog sextants to navigate in space until the early 2000s

[cgalo]

"Adorable" is such a condescending way of putting it.

[deputorswann]

Some people just like the sound of their voice.

[kras_mazov]

Could you be a little bit more specific?

[demesisx]

This video will age like milk when nix takes over the dev world. Tammer Saleh has no idea what he's talking about. Nix can be used to BUILD docker/OCI images. Get it straight, Tammer.

[jasonhunter]

how can you grow up to be so useless? I'll try to teach my kids never to be this useless.