Comment by yladiz
12 hours ago
Of course. I wouldn’t say that Nix is a tool without much use or merit, because setting up development environments can be a huge pain and I understand why some people would use it and prefer it.
My biggest complaint is what I mentioned above: it’s trying to be everything for package management, and adds a lot of complexity (and I disagree that it’s always necessary/inherent) compared to just installing a tool and sometimes upgrading it. That complexity often means I have to debug it rather than the tool that I want to - I might have to debug Nix instead of Node, which is not always straightforward. In my limited experience Nix got in my way more than I’d like, and in ways I didn’t expect or want to deal with, and until it’s as seamless as something like Homebrew or apt, it’ll be a hard sell.
> it’s trying to be everything for package management, and adds a lot of complexity (and I disagree that it’s always necessary/inherent) compared to just installing a tool and sometimes upgrading it. That complexity often means I have to debug it rather than the tool that I want to
Although you're right about nix's DX being quite rough, the problem isn't exactly that it "tries to be everything for package management".
Consider the assumption Nix wants to make about its packages: it should be possible to package software by putting it in some arbitrary directory (i.e. not just /usr/bin), where its dependencies are also put in (or symlinked to) some arbitrary location.
I think with well-written software, this should be a reasonable assumption, but you're going to run into friction with that. (Friction which will require you to have a good breadth/depth of understanding).
In my experience, a lot of the complexity when dealing with Nix is with the large and organic complexity of nixpkgs.
The "trying to be everything" is more incidental to the expressive package management. -- NixOS is 'just' an OS built upon the package manager; dev shells are 'just' shells which expose the build environment of a package; etc.