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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Nix is the vim of package management but without good documentation. So it's incredibly powerful and useful once you get into it, but imagine trying to learn vim without any docs or guidance. Vim has a steep learning curve with good documentation, YouTube tutorials, blog posts, and forum guides.
Nix doesn't really have a wealth of that.
That's nix package management and nixos in a nutshell.
Because it has abominable documentation. Some tools built on top of nix on the other hand have stellar documentation (devenv and jetbox come to mind). The tools even try hard to hide nix because they know it's a goddamn nightmare for beginners to use it.
The CLI is a mess due to the indecisiveness of the nix maintainers whether they want flakes or not. So much so that the official manual doesn't use flakes, but many guides on the internet immediately go into nix dev#yadadada which leaves beginners and mid-term users alike very confused.
Another point is that graphical applications can't use OpenGL without dirty hacks like nixgl. Not only that, installing GUI applications using nix doesn't make them show up in your desktop environment (start menu, finder, whatever). No, you need to either manually create .desktop files or install another tool like home-manager to have them show (and not work properly because of OpenGL).
To top it off, unless you know better, it's command-line only. SnowflakeOS is building GUI tools around nix, but they aren't like say Discover or the Gnome Appstore: you can't install the GUI and have everything working - no, you need to figure everything out.
In short, nix is absolutely nowhere close for desktop user adoption, much less mainstream linux adoption (dev, sysadmin, tester, or whatever other technical role exists).
Flakes confuse me.
Guides online say "oh yeah just do this, it's easy" and don't mention flakes at all.
So I try the thing and it says ARE YOU FUCKING SURE, YOU IDIOT, YOU ABSOLUTE MORON, YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITHOUT ENABLING FLAKES AND YOU HAVEN'T DONE THAT SO YOU CLEARLY DON'T DESERVE NICE THINGS but like, is there just no non-flakes version of that thing, what's the point of having an option that's not enabled by default if you can't do anything without it on
@[email protected] shares my pain and also explained what I was doing wrong:
https://programming.dev/comment/7537131
Flakes is still experimental. NixOS devs takes a bunch of time to release that. So most experienced users have enabled Flakes since years. Two different systems are available, which does not help ease of learning.
Right but like "be able to do anything" requires you to have Flakes enabled
I use NixOS on my personal machine and nixpkgs on my work Ubuntu (22.04 LTS). In the absence of NixOS I would not be using it: it somehow breaks all the file (open, save, etc.) windows, causing any app that tries to open one to crash (particularly annoying for browsers).
Not to mention the wrapGL issue.
It needs more polish on "genericlinux". I did previously use it on MacOS, and it did make MacOS almost bearable - definitely years ahead of brew.