Introducing Zero to Nix

We at Determinate Systems are excited to announce Zero to Nix a new learning resource for Nix that’s designed to be beginner friendly and to reach people who have tried to learn Nix in the past but haven’t quite gotten over the hump.

There are two things that set Zero to Nix apart from other resources:

  1. It has users install Nix using Nix Installer, a next-generation tool created by Determinate Systems (announcements on the way in the coming weeks). Nix Installer enables you to seamlessly uninstall Nix from your system and installs Nix with flakes and the unified CLI enabled in the nix.conf configuration.
  2. It takes an explicitly flakes-centric approach to learning Nix.

Zero to Nix is a work in progress, especially the concept docs, but we think it’s a major step forward for reaching new Nix users.

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Wow, my congrats! it looks very neat!

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It looks cool, but I don’t really enjoy how it’s ostensibly branded :confused: but that’s definitely an improvement for appeal to Nix, and it explains flakes which is (unfortunately?) used by everyone nowadays despite it’s still “experimental”.

As for the nix-installer, I’ve been following the development for months, and I’ve been using it for each non-NixOS system with no issue, I hope this will improve people’s experience when it come to install Nix. (The project is open source, in Rust, everyone can contribute). That’s weird to end up with two installers, but it’s always nice to have choice, users will use the best alternative for them. (In my opinion).

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I welcome all new resources available for new and existing users to ramp up on Nix/NixOS and the related ecosystem or existing users to stay up-to-date. My suggestion though is to better coordinate and communicate with the documentation initiatives already underway within the NixOS community which it appears you were aware.

Related thread:

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It’s a bit tricky because if it’s under-branded it may come across as official or neutral, when it is of course neither. We’re totally open to suggestion on how to do this better, so please do let us know if we can improve.

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Maybe a “© DeterminateSystems” at the bottom?

Or, still at the bottom: “Provided by DeterminateSystems” and a GitHub logo to go to the sources, showing it’s open source :ok_hand:t3:

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