Perhaps dumb questions inbound ;)
I use Arch because I’m strapped for time and my system is always moving.
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2 minutes to install something? AUR probably has it.
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Ten minutes of free time to look for a software that fits a new need? Try random AUR things (auditing PKGBUILDs is just twenty seconds or so).
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If I need a tiny patch, I’ll just add a sed or patch file to the PKGBUILD. (Super easy, you barely learn any syntax cuz it’s intuitive shell.)
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make && make install/meson blahblahusually just works. -
Wiki does the thinking for me if I need something special (e.g. hw video acceleration)
Buuuut update surprises can be a pain (e.g. Pipewire explodes Saturday evening) and declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin’ AWESOME, so I’m considering NixOS for my new laptop (old one’s webcam broke). So I ask:
- How much can I grok in a week?
- I need to know Nixlang, right? I have a ton of dotfiles and random homemade cpp commands in ~/.local/bin that I use daily
- How quick is it to make a derivation?
- I
make installa lot, do I need to declare that due to non-FHS? Can I boilerplate the whole thing with someone else’smake installand ctrl+c ctrl+v? How does genAI fare? (Lemmy hates word guess bots, I know)
- I
- How quick is it to install something new and random?
- Do I just use
nix-shellif I need something asap? Do I need to make a derivation for all my programs? e.g. do I need to declare a Hyprland plugin I’m test-running?
- Do I just use
- How long do you research a new package for?
- On Gentoo I always looked up USE flags (NOO my time); on Arch I just audit the PKGBUILD and test-run it (20 seconds); on Ubuntu I had to find the relevant PPA (2 minutes). What’s it like for Nix?
- Can you set up dev environments quickly or do you need to write a ton of configs?
- I hear python can be annoying. Do C++/Android Studio have header file/etc. issues?
- What maintenance ouchies do you run into? How long to rectify?
- Do I need to finagle on my own to have /boot encrypted?
- I boot via: unencrypted EFI grub asks for LUKS password -> decrypt /boot, which then has a keyfile -> decrypt and mount btrfs root partition. But lots of guides don’t do it this way
Thanks for bearing with me ദ്ദി(｡•̀ヮ<)~✩‧₊
I just started using nix recently. I really like the concept, and how simple it is to “temporarily” install an app only needed briefly.
I was trying to install a python program i wrote, and packaged with poetry (on an arch system) to nix. Pip and pipx both threw errors, nothing seemed to work. Advice online seemed like i needed to basically create a nix flake for the app. I still havent gotten it installed because i have no idea what nix flakes are.
Its probably just a learning curve, and not using nix the “nix way” but im incredibly frustrated and it was a massive time sink for me. I figured pipx would basically work like flatpak does and just install the thing in my home, leaving the system immutable or whatever, and staying mostly in the spirit of nix.
So i’d say its weird enough of a distro to waste your time sometimes.
That said, it seems to have the cleanest updates ive ever seen on linux. So much so i could probably just run them via cron, and never think about it again.
So win some lose some…
So, the problem is that flakes are technically an “experimental” feature, and thus are not allowed to be included as a primary solution in the official documentation. But, basically everybody uses flakes, so it leads to this crazy documentation split, and is a big part of why documentation on Nix is so bad.
Some stuff can only be done with flakes, some stuff only with non-flakes and you have to figure out which is which on your own, while also dealing with the poor documentation for either.
The advice you received was wrong. You could also use a combination of a
default.nixfile and ashell.nixfile to create a package and development environment for your app. But, the documentation is so poor that it’s unlikely you will learn this, and figuring out how to do this on your own, is again, a massive time sink.