I tried it out one single time and it failed to install or update or something. Had to then find all the places it had inserted itself into in my system. Later I found out it’s based on some LISP variant. Even later I found out you can’t install firefox with it because of gnu or something?
That all combined dissuaded me from touching it again.
nix has terrible documentation, but it’s kinda worked for me, so I’m sticking with it.
The idea behind it really appeals to me. However, Guix is so niche that I felt like it was not worth the effort to actually daily drive it. I went the NixOS way instead and have been daily driving it now for almost 2years. I’m really satisfied with the paradigm immutable and reproducible os. I also manage my servers this way and it makes it really easy to rollback stuff.
The learning curve is the same as for any language but you have to relearn how to manage an os this way as it can be really different than a trad os. It forces you to really understand for example how packages traditionally expect to link to various libs available on your system.
I don’t like the idea of configuring pm (or anything else) using a programming language. So I would try nix first if I feel that I need it. However I don’t.
The ultimate output of Nix is one set of data, usually the description of a derivation (~= package). You cannot cause arbitrary side-effects with it like writing to files or making network requests with it.
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