Too complicated and poor beginner documentation
Especially for things like built-in functions or nixpkgs functions, all those programming aspects of the Nix programming language. Noogle and the Nix Pills helped a little but not a whole lot.
after spending +3 years getting experienced and reading a lot of the source code (getting past the documentation/learning-curve problem), I can say there are at least two fundamental flaws, with nixpkgs moreso than nixos:
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The culture issue. See thread below
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The messy mono-repo was never desgined to be searchable. It might feel searchable to a newby, but many teams have dumped tons of effort and slapped together lots of hacks to make niche-package-versions even halfway searchable. Devbox is doing a good job of fixing this, but its not there yet.
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The monorepo design is unmaintainable/unscalable from a package maintainer standpoint. There's a ton of contributor burnout, there's no automated quality control on packages, to outsiders its not obvious how to report package-specific issues or how to edit/fix/contribute to a single package, and instead of 30min to publish a hello-world npm or cargo package, users need to make a PR on the core, and get it approved. Meaning publishing a hello-world package would get rejected anyways. The good news is flakes hub is fixing this, and I'm really excited for that.
The good is;
- The pros still outweigh the cons. My projects from 3 years ago that I haven't touched still work (0 bitrot) first try, no manual install/setup needed.
- people have put a ton of effort into nix. Its truely amazing how many things work in nix despite how absurdly difficult it is to get things working with nix
- it is pretty much as reproducable as it can be and nothing else is even remotely close.
The messy mono-repo was never desgined to be searchable
I'm not sure what you mean by "searchable"?
https://search.nixos.org/packages exists and it's generally pretty damn good.
The monorepo design is unmaintainable/unscalable from a package maintainer standpoint. There’s a ton of contributor burnout, there’s no real quality control on packages
There is contributor burnout and perhaps some quality issues here and there but the monorepo isn't the reason for that. In fact, it'd be a lot worse if we had hundreds of smaller repos instead as wide-reaching changes would become basically impossible with our current manpower.
There have been calls to fragment Nixpkgs for years but they've almost always been struck down because none of what was suggested would improve anything about our current maintenance issues.
to outsiders its not obvious how to report package-specific issues
You simply open an issue on GitHub. I don't know how it could be any more clear.
I just checked and we don't explicitly document this in CONTRIBUTING.md but I don't think we should need to. It's just too obvious IMO.
how to edit/fix/contribute to a single package
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#how-to-create-pull-requests
flakes hub is fixing this, and I’m really excited for that.
FlakeHub fixes none of the maintenance issues of Nixpkgs.
You actually bring up a very good point that I missed; another problem, maybe the largest problem with nix, is the culture issue.
A comment like "what do you mean nixOS doesn't have good documentation??? we have tons of good documentation!" feels very similar to reading what you just said about "You could simply open an issue on Github, I dont know how it could be clearer". Neither of those are a question. They're not asking "how can we do better? (I'm sorry you, as a new user, had a hard time)". Those comments are statements, and they say "you [person struggling to report a package-specific issue] are the problem; our system doesn't need to change. YOU need to change".
This culture issue has real consequences. It's the reason Determinate Systems has a separately maintained nixpkgs-installer script, and separately maintained documentation. Its the reason I also have my own independently maintained nixpkg-installer and nixpkg-uninstaller script. _
Maybe you haven't had our problem because you're really skilled and familiar with nix/github/whatever. Maybe you haven't run into our problem because your use-case doesn't overlap with ours. I am glad you don't run into the problem. But that doesn't somehow make the problem not-a-problem.
Adopt a legacy codebase that is massive and requires EXACTLY ruby
2.6.0-rc1. On ubuntu, using rbenv, it takes a newby 30 sec to list all the available versions, and 30 sec to install ruby2.6.0-rc1.Try finding that version on search.nixos.org.
Even excluding versions, try searching for the extremely-commonly-needed "Core Foundation" package on search.nixos.org. I assure you the package does exist on nixpkgs, I've been using it for years. As a newby had to spend WEEKS looking through the source code and learning nix-lang quirks just to find it.
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But more importantly please ignore those details and look at the bigger picture; we are on the same team. I'm not insulting or ignoring the massive accomplishments nix team has made. They (maybe you as well) are giants that have moved moutains and accomplished things I wouldve considered basically impossible. I want to help the core devs have LESS work. I want to have productive discussions about the trade-offs of federated vs monorepo, searchability, documentation improvements, installer scripts, etc.
But we can't.
Not until the discussion starts with "I agree there's a problem" instead of "there is no problem other than YOUR lack of skill"
How do you see these solutions by third-party? Wouldn't that likely lead to go far away from the community and do commercialization and proprietary solutions?
I worry some about devbox being closed source with their package indexing soltuion. I talked with them on a video call and they seem like great guys. And they said they'd pull the indexing part out of their private repo and make it open source so I could help work on it. They openly talked about their design and have blog posts about it too. But that was 2 maybe 3 months ago and I still haven't heard back. I should maybe ping them. The real downside is they've got an unusual amount of "lock in". Devbox is not a tool that enhances nix, its just a tool that uses nix under the hood. However they do solve the ease-of-use problem which is a really big deal (they make some tradeoffs though).
Flakes hub, by Determinate Systems, I have absolutely 0 concern about. They're truely just enhancing nix, and even if they dissapeared the packages already on flakeshub would still effectively work because they're distrubuted. Flakeshub is just a registry for standarized searching of flakes by individual people. Publishing is built on top of github actions which I'm not the biggest fan of. But there are ways of running github actions locally.
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I dislike that it is hard to find relevant instructions on what you are looking for. That being said, there are many channels- Matrix, Discourse, Discord, Lemmy, that have a lot of smart people that are willing to help.
I'm not a programmer and I run NixOS on my personal, family, and friends' PCs. After about three months of struggling severely, I was able to get my one flake git repo to the point where I have installed it and replaced other linux distros with NixOS on these machines. I also don't often understand the warnings that are displayed when rebuilding a configuration, but have been able to solve them so far with a little guess work sometimes.
I'm setting them up with syncthing for their home directories and am looking into some easier than rsync based programs to keep them backed up. Then I can easily reinstall NixOS, git clone the flake, and have them back up and running in the event that they nuke their PC. This hasn't happened yet, unlike on other distros. Plus, I have only received complements about the systems. Someday, if Wayland gets there, I will be able to remotely access them. There probably is a way, but I haven't figured out an easy way to do so yet.
So overall more happy and satisfied, because all things tech take time and learning.
Next step is to port my Ubuntu server over to NixOS and probably use Docker to spin up webapps. Maybe even declare them the nix way.
Would really like a hands on course that takes you from basic nix expressions through devops.
Yesterday, I ran into an issue where two versions of Qt couldn't run at the same time. This problem has been mentioned by a few people before, with no solutions offered for users. In my case, I was trying to start a nix shell with the rpi-imager. Thankfully, I was able to use the cli, but this was still unexpected and I was under the impression that nix was supposed to fix problems like this.
It's accumulated a lot of cruft over its >20 years of existence. Especially the language, which can't be changed due to otherwise breaking backwards compatibility.
There's Nickel which is sort of Nix expression language 2.0 but, honestly, the Nix expression language is perfectly adequate for what it needs to do.
Not to say it couldn't be better I wouldn't put it inn any top 10 of what is holding Nix back.
I just remembered the thing I really dislike about NixOS is that I cannot declare flatpaks, appimages, and the like. It would be really useful if this feature was added somehow seeing that there always seems to be an odd package that doesn't function fully from nixpkgs and the workaround is mainly flatpak.
If anyone is interested, it looks like there is https://github.com/gmodena/nix-flatpak. Will try it out soon.
for appimage, see e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/networking/mockoon/default.nix
Thanks, I'd like to understand appimage tools, and nixified Docker / Podman to start up a headless server, but they all seem pretty difficult for me right now.
