Comment by rgoulter
11 hours ago
Right.
Nix is a wonderful technology. But I would not argue it is practical if you can afford "just fix it when it breaks". A nix setup more/less requires you to pay all the cost up front.
I appreciate putting in the effort now so that I don't have to later for stuff like declarative dev environments. It's really nice to not have to copy-and-paste installation instructions from a README. -- I did like the point: until you've felt what a comfortable design is, you cannot imagine it.
Yeah, I'm a Nix user and fan but I'm still going to be stuck fixing it when it breaks. The biggest thing that I have to remind myself is that reproducible != "just works." Once you get to what you want, you're set but until then and every change after, there's a chance you'll be in the weeds.
At least from my usage, the fact that your configuration is all tied to whether the entirety of nixpkgs-unstable is working can be a real headache. Like recently when CMake was upgraded to 4.0, it took down a healthy handful of packages, which meant you couldn't update anything until things were resolved or you were really fluent in Nix hackery. (I was the former)
I have sworn off nixpkgs-unstable for basically anything but testing. I’m now on the 6 months stable release cadence and never going back. Much much better experience. Unstable really is unstable. And that’s great! But it’s not for me.