I read the article, this is not the first time that people think of Nix/NixOS like so. Its a standard case of wanting to use Nix ecosystem to the fullest, but you do not need to. You need to find the balance for yourself and that is different from person to person. I am using NixOs for about 9 years, and in whole that time I have never felt overwhelmed. People are just different.
I came to the same conclusion. If I have a problem that I know nixos can solve it’s useful tool in my belt. But man you try to do anything out side the box the learning curve is massive. Good for those that know but when you only get to tinker a few times a week for a couple hours just getting things to work can be fun at first but gets old very quick.
It would seem that Nix has succumbed in this case to its Archenemy.
Because reading the docs is too hard for an imbecile?
I’m gonna be honest, I use NixOS, but the docs fucking suck, and a number of things are just broken in nixpkgs. For instance, I recently discovered the
structuredExtraConfigoption for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options, which means some kernel patches won’t work unless you manually supply the entire kernel config.EDIT: what’s even more annoying about it not working is that it fails to apply silently. In other words, your kernel tries to compile and then an hour later it fails because your config changes weren’t applied.
If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner’s manual for every car you’ve owned? If you’re a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?
At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don’t need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.
I suspect this attitude of “read the fucken manuel” comes from when tooling was simpler and you could actually read all the manuals (or buy a book) to learn every small bit of it. Today, I’d be surprised if someone actually read all the Windows, .Net, and Powershell docs before attempting to write a small script.
Heck, even simpler things like Python have massive docs beneath every layer of them. You don’t learn everything from the ground up anymore, only the relevant parts to your use case.
I cannot speak on behalf of the article author, but as someone who personally is an imbecile, the answer is: definitely!
