Comment by spease

> large quantity of tooling

Please no. I want one tool that works well, not N tools each with their own idiomatic way of doing things that everybody has to install and learn.

Looking over the install guide, this looks like it's just as bad as nix, it just hasn't been around as long. There are three approaches to installing nix that are suggested (the vanilla route, Determinate, and "this script") that are left up to the presumably new-to-nix user to research which one to use.

Then it references flakes, as if you're expected to understand them, and links to the main nix article with dozens of pages. Then if you used the first or third approaches to install nix (but not the second), you need to run a couple shell commands.

Then you need to run a nix command. Then edit a text file. Then set your "bling" level, which just isn't explained anywhere. Then another nix command. Then another two fleek commands, which aren't even provided, even though they're the first two fleek commands the user will ever issue.

And then, finally, you've got fleek installed. I think. It could use a "Congratulations!" or some party emojis to let you know you're done, rather than immediately jumping into the deprecated install options (and why are these even here if they're deprecated? How am I as a complete n00b user supposed to make the judgment call that my need to use them outweighs them being deprecated?).

Users that are comfortable with the level of shell involvement required to install Arch may find it familiar, but I would not expect someone accustomed to primarily using a macOS UI to find it reasonable.

And this appears to mean you can manage packages (but not the version of them, nor the version of nix, so you've lost reproducibility), your path, and "bling". But presumably, not `shell.nix`. And I'm guessing anything more advanced requires you to rewrite your .yml in Nix anyway.

So it's a lot of work to ask a first-time user to do, advanced users will find it of limited usefulness, and even the install process makes it glaringly obvious that it's a very incomplete abstraction with a lot of holes.

This also means that people with Nix knowledge will be maintaining the tool and polishing its tools instead of Nix, so only a subset of downstream users will gain from any improvements. Essentially: https://xkcd.com/927/. To be fair, I realize it's not a zero-sum game, and it's probably a lot easier and more rewarding to contribute to an independent project.

Sorry for the harshness of the reply, I realize a lot of work went into fleek. My frustration comes from a place of repeatedly losing a lot of time to tools that people think are user-friendly because they mentally excuse all the work they're offloading onto the end-user as justified.

The fact of the matter is that when I reach for a tool, more often than not I want to immediately use that tool, then put it down as quickly as possible and get back to focusing on what I was doing. I don't want to execute a half-dozen commands or have to make uninformed decisions just to get started. This is why Nix itself is so frustrating to me; the end result is indeed as promised and reproducible, but getting there often involves so many edge cases, gotchas, exceptions to the rule, or simply flat-out broken stuff that it completely derails my focus from whatever I was trying to do.

I think (though perhaps its my own bias) most users are the same for any popular tool. There are some niche users that use it every day or all the time, but in the case of a package manager like nix, I probably only interact with it briefly when I need to install a new program, change dependencies for a software package, and so forth. So, a few seconds every few days or weeks. Even as a developer.