Ah, brilliant - Balena has improved my life a fair bit, but it does have some annoyances … if nothing else, having customized docker daemon running all the time takes a big chunk of the memory of smaller devices!
vcsode uses json, which is simple key-value pairs.
nix is a turing-complete programming language, so these GUIs will never work for it.
nixos is a distro for people who want to write code to configure their system(s), simple as.
that will never be beginner-friendly because most people do not want to write code - and that is okay, there’s so much else out there for them to try should they so desire.
We’ve just made an announcement post in this discourse: Introducing Thymis: Web-Based Dashboard and Device Provisioning for NixOS
Elm Lang is a Haskell-like language and frontend web platform with strict Algebraic Data Types and a compiler better than anything else on the planet. Maybe there is some interesting parallels and valuable lessons in Elm?
The compiler can walk the programmer through their code until it compiles — at which point “if it compiles it works!”
With Elm the developer doesn’t have to create a Type Signature and the compiler does a legendary job of inference and guides the developer.
If writing Nix was like writing Elm it would explode in usability and adoption. One could argue that Elm’s philosophy and DX is better suited to a DSL like Nix than to the Web due to similarity. Elm is nothing like JavaScript and very much like Haskell.