# Who uses NixOS? Who are you people? (And good-bye)
**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507
**Category:** Help
**Created:** [December 9, 2021, 7:44am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507 "2021-12-09T07:44:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mwb](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/mwb)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 7:44am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/1 "2021-12-09T07:44:11Z")
Haskell programmers, mostly?
BTW, I decided to give up on NixOS. It’s not that I don’t know Haskell. I do, or rather did (up to, but not including monads). OCaml is a better language IMHO, because it’s eager. I think the creator of Haskell admitted that laziness was a misfeature long ago. But I’m not trying to start a debate here.
Anyway, I gave NixOS a try in a VM after watching some tutorials on YouTube. Here are my impressions:
CONS:
- The complexity is offensive. No other word for it. Simple things should be simple. There should be one, and preferably only one obvious way of doing things. NixOS took this motto and did the opposite, with its cacophony of nix, nixos-\*, nix-env, home-manager, etc. etc. It’s not that the complexity could not be overcome. I’m sure it can all be learned. I just find it distasteful.
- On top of that, all this complexity seems to be poorly documented. Even when you follow instructions the best way you can, they often don’t work.
- [nixos.org](http://nixos.org) says “if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another”. I don’t think this is accurate, since there is state in `~` and `/var`, so while _e.g._ Pantheon’s Calendar worked for the maintainer, it didn’t work for me. Moreover, a package can depend on others without requiring them at build time. I kind of knew this line was misleading going in, but still, let me register my complaint.
- I’ve learned that ZFS/BTRFS + Debian can achieve rollbacks too, which is a cons for NixOS, since everything is relative.
- The RedHat talk that you all loved had the opposite effect on me. Who the heck gets upset that his OS supports some filesystem out of the box?! Who finds this relatable? Or the best talk they ever watched? People very different from me, I guess. I like it when stuff works.
PROS:
- This community here is obviously a plus. I don’t think there is a distro with nerdier users.
Anyway, bye, and thanks for trying to help. I might pop back if I change my mind, but I probably won’t.
---
### Author:  [@gurkan](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/gurkan)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 8:03am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/2 "2021-12-09T08:03:57Z")
Some valid points. I’m using Nixos for a while and [I know](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/about-the-gap-of-nix/16098) what you’re talking about when saying too complex. I recently tried to switch to flakes and nope’d back hard, since I couldn’t understand what is going on at most examples I saw on github. I guess one needs FP background for it.
> Even when you follow instructions the best way you can, they often don’t work.
Problem is, they “do” work, but for a limited time. Implementation changes, which needs a change on the .nix files, which makes some documents obsolete.
> Since there is state in `~` and `/var` , so while _e.g._ Pantheon’s Calendar worked for the maintainer, it didn’t work for me
There are limits. Nixos fixes reproducibility issues up to a point. Some (including me) pushes a bit more with managing ~ states with home manager etc. so we’d have more solid output, but yeah, can’t do magic.
> a package can depend on others without requiring them at build time
Never had such issue, runtime dependencies also included in packages.
---
### Author:  [@r-burns](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/r-burns)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 8:22am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/3 "2021-12-09T08:22:05Z")
I think Nix-on-non-NixOS is the best onramp to NixOS proper. It’s how I started, and it definitely makes the complexity a lot less offensive. I would not recommend anyone to start out with NixOS cold turkey.
---
### Author:  [@7c6f434c](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/7c6f434c)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 8:41am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/4 "2021-12-09T08:41:47Z")
Thanks for the honest impressions!
I guess from entire-ecosystem-integration and documentation and language-non-laziness point of view Guix could be a better fit for you. But if you only want rollbacks and are not burned much by package conflicts, probably still not worth the trouble.
PS. I don’t like almost anything I know about Haskell, so no, not only Haskell users. On the other hand I gave up on NixOS and built my own NixOS-like system because NixOS still integrates things too much.
---
### Author:  [@mindtree](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/mindtree)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 8:46am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/5 "2021-12-09T08:46:25Z")
> Who are you people?
For the most part I do “creative coding”, e.g. artworks and installations for museums, galleries, live performance, etc. I also do a lot of sound design and music production.
I use NixOS for its up-to-date-ness, easy rollbacks, reproducibility, flexibility and declarative nature (no “steps” to remember other than `nixos-rebuild switch`). It makes setting up machines for installations, sharing configuration and remote deployment/management so easy without needing layers of indirection like VMs or containers. It also means that once my pro-audio environment is working nicely (a miracle on Linux), it just continues to work even when moving to different machines because everything about my setup is declared in the configuration files.
> Haskell programmers, mostly?
Nay, but Rust programmer yes.
I do agree that it’s seemingly complex at first - I think I’d attribute this to two things:
- unfamiliarity: I think it’s necessarily different to what we’re used to make great leaps in progress. The design rethinks so much about what it means to be a distro or package manager and avoids so many common problems as a result.
- I think Nix is still finding its feet, e.g. `nix-env` still being recommended in the docs (if it were up to me I think I’d remove the command altogether), flakes still in the works, nothing along the lines of `home-manager` being “blessed” yet, etc.
Still, these seem like solvable issues, and I’m yet to come across a distro as promising as NixOS. I’m curious about Guix, but mostly because in my mind it looks like NixOS with a lisp and I’ve been curious about learning lisp.
---
### Author:  [@L-as](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/L-as)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 9:15am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/6 "2021-12-09T09:15:50Z")
> [@mindtree](#):
>
> Nay, but Rust programmer yes.
This isn’t completely true. Haskell developers are highly overrepresented in this demographic.
There are several reasons for this, but Nix itself is inspired by Haskell. In addition, the Cardano ecosystem exclusively makes use of Nix, which necessitates that many Haskell engineers use it.
The company that mostly funds Nix development (Tweag) is also a Haskell consultancy. You’ll notice many Haskell-isms in the language, such as `builtins.foldl'`. The reason for the `'` is because the Haskell `foldl` is lazy, while `foldl'` is strict in its accumulator. The concept of “thunks” also largely comes from Haskell.
---
### Author:  [@matthewcroughan](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/matthewcroughan)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 3:19pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/7 "2021-12-09T15:19:09Z")
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up at your shell and believe whatever you want to believe. Continuing to run installers mutating your system in blissful ignorance. Not questioning whether - perhaps - your package dependencies are incomplete. Accepting that one version is more than any person ever needs. Never worrying how to get here all over again.
You take the Nix pill - you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole of reproducibility goes.
---
### Author:  [@almostnobody](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/almostnobody)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 3:30pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/8 "2021-12-09T15:30:28Z")
if you liked the premise of nix/nixos, you should check on the state of the ecosystem in some months/years when flakes will be the norm, documentation integrated into the codebase and community grows into the size of the project(right now it’s clear that nixpkgs is too large for current size of the community, which is why it’s not always a smooth ride, but it will only get better, as long as the community grows, which it does)
---
### Author:  [@pxc](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/pxc)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 3:42pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/9 "2021-12-09T15:42:32Z")
I started using Nix in order to install things in a computer lab that the sysadmins wouldn’t install for me. I didn’t really care about the Nix design at that time except that it worked and that (with a pivot root environment) I could use its binary caching.
I later tried NixOS because I liked the idea of defining my whole environment in a single file. This forced me to package some things I wanted to use on NixOS, and while complex packages could be kind of awful, I was very impressed by how easy it was to write packages for Nix in general compared to writing DEB and RPM packages. I was also impressed by the override functionality in Nixpkgs (despite its heterogeneity of multiple, similar mechanisms), which makes customizing packages crazy easy.
When I got help working on some of the tougher packages, I realized that the NixOS community was absolutely full of exceptionally smart and helpful people. I’ve not been very involved in the community in recent years, but it’s still clear to me that that’s one of NixOS’ greatest strengths.
For me, Nix reinforced my interest in FP even more than the other way around. After college I got my first job at a startup where I got to do some FP (not in Haskell), although I’ve since moved on more to the DevOps side of things.
Nix is complex, and the command line tooling can be clunky. The amount of choice _within_ the Nix ecosystem can be overwhelming, due to the propagation of competing, third-party tools. The dynamic character of Nix can lead to some really surprising and unhelpful error messages. The Nixpkgs codebase itself is as essential a reference for me as any of the manuals, unfortunately.
Despite all of that, I actually feel better than ever about Nix! I find the language very well-suited to its task, and the recent improvements in error messages are very welcome. Despite some minor gripes, I much prefer the new CLI, and I’m glad that flakes will finally provide some blessed conventions for pinning packages and providing repository metadata for projects written in Nixlang. The documentation for Nix has improved a lot since I started using it. The community is still outstanding. So that’s why I’m still here.
---
### Author:  [@pxc](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/pxc)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 4:03pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/10 "2021-12-09T16:03:58Z")
> [@mwb](#):
>
> The RedHat talk that you all loved had the opposite effect on me. Who the heck gets upset that his OS supports some filesystem out of the box?! Who finds this relatable?
Oh, minor point here: I don’t think the upsetting thing was that an experimental filesystem that can only be run on a special fork of the Linux kernel is well supported. It was two things:
1. The advice he got on how to achieve this was so simple that he _couldn’t believe_ it was useful or on-topic advice. So he was initially annoyed at receiving (what he thought was) bad advice from someone who (he thought) wasn’t really listening to his problem and (he thought) didn’t understand how experimental `bcachefs` still was/is.
2. When that simple advice _did_ work, it laid waste to all his overcomplicated plans about how to approach the problem. There might be some playful anger in this, but the experience is mostly delight, like in being amusingly duped by a brilliant magic trick. You find yourself thinking _how the hell did you do that, you clever bastard!?_ It’s a feeling that your expectations of what’s even _possible_ have been subverted. It’s perplexing but it’s also joyful.
Hopefully that makes it a little more relatable.
([This](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/half-a-presentation-i-had-in-my-company-about-nixos/16467) is the thread for the talk under discussion.)
---
### Author:  [@erictapen](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/erictapen)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 4:32pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/11 "2021-12-09T16:32:04Z")
You are the author of [nannou](https://nannou.cc/), right? Thanks so much for it, it’s becoming my new after work hobby 😊
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### Author:  [@Congee](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/Congee)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 7:19pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/12 "2021-12-09T19:19:32Z")
Just wanna say ZFS + Ubuntu failed to did a rollback for me after upgrading to Ubuntu 21.04. NixOS saved my ass.
---
### Author:  [@jonringer](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/jonringer)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 7:48pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/13 "2021-12-09T19:48:25Z")
> [@mwb](#):
>
> BTW, I decided to give up on NixOS. It’s not that I don’t know Haskell. I do, or rather did (up to, but not including monads). OCaml is a better language IMHO, because it’s eager. I think the creator of Haskell admitted that laziness was a misfeature long ago. But I’m not trying to start a debate here.
I’m not sure what to make of this… comes off as passively hostile.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> The complexity is offensive. No other word for it. Simple things should be simple. There should be one, and preferably only one obvious way of doing things. NixOS took this motto and did the opposite, with its cacophony of nix, nixos-\*, nix-env, home-manager, etc. etc. It’s not that the complexity could not be overcome. I’m sure it can all be learned. I just find it distasteful.
I would argue that, at it’s core, nix is simple. It’s only remarkable abstraction is the creation and realisation of a .drv. And that includes anything from just bytes pulled from the internet to a package.
I will say that the cli situtation is not… great right now. And we are in kind of a transition state. `nix-env` probably does more harm than good, but made sense before home-manager. And it’s still awkward to point people to a community project.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> On top of that, all this complexity seems to be poorly documented. Even when you follow instructions the best way you can, they often don’t work.
I’m not sure about that, the official manuals should work.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> [nixos.org](http://nixos.org) says “if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another”. I don’t think this is accurate, since there is state in `~` and `/var` , so while _e.g._ Pantheon’s Calendar worked for the maintainer, it didn’t work for me.
Some of the DE programs make a lot of assumptions about services being available. This is more true of gnome, but probably true of others. This is likely band-aided at the nixos module level, but probably impossible to do at the package level.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> Moreover, a package can depend on others without requiring them at build time. I kind of knew this line was misleading going in, but still, let me register my complaint.
For things like PATH, XDG\_DATA\_DIRS, and other contextual; this can be achieved with wrapping. [Example](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/913585103b8311c7f946d3d3ff48419b9ad14b21/pkgs/tools/package-management/nix-template/default.nix#L35-L36)
> [@mwb](#):
>
> I’ve learned that ZFS/BTRFS + Debian can achieve rollbacks too, which is a cons for NixOS, since everything is relative.
Those are rollbacks at a dataset level, and you can only view one-at-a-time as they share a mount point. To successfully do rollback using a fs feature, you will also need to make sure that the ordering of your mountpoints are correct, which just a consistent concern. NixOS you have all of the existing system generations available, and there’s a separation of concerns about system configuration and system state.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> The RedHat talk that you all loved had the opposite effect on me. Who the heck gets upset that his OS supports some filesystem out of the box?! Who finds this relatable? Or the best talk they ever watched? People very different from me, I guess. I like it when stuff works.
I think we watched a different video. He was having trouble getting bcachefs on root on another system, but was successful with nixos with just a single line change.
> [@mwb](#):
>
> Anyway, bye, and thanks for trying to help. I might pop back if I change my mind, but I probably won’t.
`>.>;`, I’m not even sure what to say to this.
---
### Author:  [@pxc](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/pxc)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 8:52pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/14 "2021-12-09T20:52:53Z")
> [@jonringer](#):
>
> It’s only remarkable abstraction is the creation and realisation of a .drv
You also don’t have to understand _how_ derivations work to get the basic idea of Nix, which is just that every possible variant of a package gets installed to a unique location that becomes read-only after build time.
To make mastering (or even just choosing!) the in-ecosystem tooling used to execute that idea feel equally simple, though, would be a new achievement. 🙂
---
### Author:  [@rofrol](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/rofrol)
#### Post date: [December 9, 2021, 9:22pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/15 "2021-12-09T21:22:21Z")
> the official manuals should work.
>
>
> \[Chapter 13. A Simple Nix Expression\](https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ch-simple-ex…pression) (from \`doc/manual/expressions/simple-expression.xml\`) introduces building packages with a worked example of building GNU hello. I attempted to use this to learn to build nix packages and was unable to build the package. I don't know where I went wrong, so this bug report is something of a step-by-step. (For context, I'm a longtime professional linux sysadmin and developer who's totally new to nix. I was able to set up a NixOS box from its manual to play around with.)
>
> The chapter is structured around three steps: writing a nix expression (13.1), writing a build script (13.2), and adding the package (13.3).
>
> 13.1 doesn't explain where to create \`default.nix\`, but from the note "It is customary to place each package in a separate directory" I figured I should create a \`test\` directory with this \`default.nix\` in it. In 13.2 I also put \`builder.sh\` in this directory.
>
> Then instead of the section heading for 13.3 ("Arguments and Variables") matching the third bullet point in the intro, it's kind of a random name. It talks about editing \`all-packages.nix\` but the syntax is invalid. As a newbie, I don't have the experience to fill in \`...\` so the example is unusable. Additionally it talks about editing \`pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix\` like that directory already exists, and the only file by that name that \`find\` turned up is \`/nix/store/ilagh0i1vxhp68hd9r73lh0f2mjqbj5x-nixos-18.09pre143771.a8c71037e04/nixos/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix\`. The description of the nix store in 5.3 has a wishy-washy warning against editing files in \`/nix/store\` and I don't see any way to regenerate that hash (or maybe I don't need to? The introduction to the hash at the top of chapter 1 says it's only based on dependencies, not contents). Still, it isn't clear at all what I'm supposed to be doing to what file, or why this is required for building hello.
>
> Then section 13.4 starts "You can now try to build Hello." and \`nix-build -A hello\` looks like it's assuming I put those files in a directory named \`hello\`, though after renaming my directory I got the error \`error: getting status of '/home/pushcx/default.nix': No such file or directory\` from outside the directory and from inside I got \`error: cannot auto-call a function that has an argument without a default value ('stdenv')\` (with no file name or line-number). The error message is useless because I'm trying to build a package, not auto-call a function, and "auto-call" does not appear in the manual. I don't see anything more to experiment with to try to fix this.
>
> After chatting with infinisil in #nixos, I think the two causes of my confusion are:
>
> 1. The manual does not provide a complete, worked example of building a package.
> 2. The manual conflates building a package and contributing publicly to nixpkgs.
>
> He suggested (via the bot, so is this a frequent problem?), "If a Nix file ./foo.nix starts with something like \`{ bar, baz }:\`, you can build it with \`nix-build -E '(import \ {}).callPackage ./foo.nix {}'\`" This doesn't match the description of \`callPackage\` in the manual, which only explains \`callPackage\` as something you'd write in \`all-packages.nix\` rather than a command-line tool. And it doesn't account for writing a \`builder.sh\`.
>
> Additionally, it would probably be worthwhile for someone on the team to watch a newbie try to work through the doc \*without\* answering any questions, because this wasn't the first issue I had to puzzle out, just the issue I couldn't puzzle out.
---
### Author:  [@nixinator](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/nixinator)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2021, 12:35am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/16 "2021-12-10T00:35:34Z")
---
### Author:  [@jonringer](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/jonringer)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2021, 12:53am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/17 "2021-12-10T00:53:32Z")
Yea, point made.
They should work, and if they don’t, then yea, that’s a problem.
---
### Author:  [@mwb](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/mwb)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2021, 9:59am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/18 "2021-12-10T09:59:27Z")
> [@jonringer](#):
>
> I’m not sure what to make of this… comes off as passively hostile.
Haskell was intended as a research language, wasn’t it? “Avoid success at all costs” and all that.
So, once they realized that laziness was a mistake, they should have removed it.
Your Haskell program eating all your RAM is also a side effect.
---
### Author:  [@mwb](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/mwb)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2021, 10:16am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/19 "2021-12-10T10:16:14Z")
I don’t understand why the system config that the end users tweak needs to be in a Turing-complete language.
Even if for some reason (that I don’t understand) `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` must be a program in a Turing-complete language, why on Earth isn’t “I want a C++ plugin in my VS Code” a simple boolean?!
etc. etc. etc.
What I think NixOS needs is a GUI / TUI configuration tool: maybe like `about:config` in Firefox, or like Cygwin. You type in its search box “vscode”, it shows a bunch of options, including the option to enable the C++ plugin. You toggle it, and that’s it.
---
### Author:  [@pennae](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/pennae)
#### Post date: [December 10, 2021, 10:37am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507/20 "2021-12-10T10:37:13Z")
[GitHub - nix-gui/nix-gui: Use NixOS Without Coding](https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui/) exists and is evolving, could be that your wish will come true before too long.
[Next page](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/who-uses-nixos-who-are-you-people-and-good-bye/16507.md?page=2)