As someone using nix because I messed up my arch luks encryption because of single command on stackoverflow.....
I haven't really learned nix os language right now and I have only installed bare minimal software like a librewolf, prism launcher, kde, I used to be a hyprland user and I might switch back in some days.
The biggest advantage to me feels nix-shell which is cross platform
I installed obs-studio from nix-shell, built a video, then used another nix-shell for ffmpeg and converted video to mp4 and uploaded it to github.
This is my general use case of obs and I very rarely make recordings and so this idea that I can install/try out software without having to worry about anything while still having no xdg issues unlike flatpak is a godsend.
Did I mention I started using nix-shell for places I would've used docker, like stirling-pdf one off cases
Most of the software on my computer needs to be rarely accessed and I love the sanity that nix provides knowing that It won't make my update times faster/if-any unlike archlinux and dependency hell is a problem I truly despise.
I have looked for better alternatives, maybe spack comes to mind, but nix-shell is still crazy good. And I can also some day use a functional programming to make it even more automated.
Isn’t your primary benefit you’re looking for the same as what containers offer? If that is true, isn’t the only major benefit that nix is a little less sluggish?
FWIW the way we use nix where I work is quite a bit lighter touch than the setups being discussed here. There are kind of three tiers of Nix implementations
- I want Nix to manage my entire os (NixOS)
- I want Nix to manage my user shell and dotfiles (home manager)
- I want Nix to manage per repository shells (nix + direnv with a flake.nix in each repo, or an .envrc that pulls a shared flake and extends it)
We use the latter and find it to be a good mix of keeping nix configuration simple but also enabling per environment shells that are reproducible
I haven't really learned nix os language right now and I have only installed bare minimal software like a librewolf, prism launcher, kde, I used to be a hyprland user and I might switch back in some days.
The biggest advantage to me feels nix-shell which is cross platform
I installed obs-studio from nix-shell, built a video, then used another nix-shell for ffmpeg and converted video to mp4 and uploaded it to github.
This is my general use case of obs and I very rarely make recordings and so this idea that I can install/try out software without having to worry about anything while still having no xdg issues unlike flatpak is a godsend.
Did I mention I started using nix-shell for places I would've used docker, like stirling-pdf one off cases
Most of the software on my computer needs to be rarely accessed and I love the sanity that nix provides knowing that It won't make my update times faster/if-any unlike archlinux and dependency hell is a problem I truly despise.
I have looked for better alternatives, maybe spack comes to mind, but nix-shell is still crazy good. And I can also some day use a functional programming to make it even more automated.