HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why has Nix suddenly become so popular?

18 points by brendanfalk ↗ HN
It seem like nix has become quite popular on HN over the last few years... [1] Engineering teams at notable tech companies (shopify, replit) are also beginning to adopt it.

But why has it suddenly become so popular? NixOS was first released in 2003. Has Nixpkgs finally hit a critical mass that you can build full projects with it? Did documentation just become much better? Did people just exploring more during covid?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=nix&sort=byPopularity&type=story

10 comments

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rektide
I disagree with the premise. I havent seem much net change in popularity. It's still widely lambasted even by it's adherents as deeply woefully lacking in middle-ground documentation especially- there's docs for absolute newbies, there's og posts discussing super advanced juju, but hardly anything inbetween. There's few guides helping explaim the wild nixscripts one come to face.
brendanfalk
This Google Trend graph shows an increase popularity. The increase has been fairly linear since 2014 but there were notable spikes in late 2021 and early 2022

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

pcthrowaway
I assumed this discussion was about the package manager and not the OS
JamesSwift
Agreed. Nix always means Nix Package Manager unless NixOS is specified. Its hard to distinguish `Nix` from `Nix package manager` in google trends though, so the "NixOS" trendline might be the best proxy for popularity of the entire ecosystem.
iswkq
> we are starting to trend on newcomers! While the majority have used Nix or NixOS in the 1 to 3 year range (37%), 30% of respondents have joined the Nix community in the last year. Our expectation is that as we continue to improve Nix and NixOS we should be seeing a positive trend that leans towards more Nix users <1 year.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983

iswkq
It seems word of mouth has been increasing (I've been using Linux since 2014 and only heard about it in late 2020). Maybe

- it has to do with DLTs like Cardano adopting Nix.

- influencers like youtubers and podcasters have began talking about it

- migration from IRC to Matrix, so people can discover it more easily

- people who are into functional programming cycles often talk about it, e.g. haskell, lisp, emacs...

- with the raise of Flatpaks and Snaps, people have been talking more often about Nix as an alternative. The same can be said about Docker/containers and is often suggested as alternative

- mainstream Linux distros taking inspiration from NixOS to make their own immutable and atomic OSs: Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, Clear Linux, ...

- since mid 2010s there was some push towards making documentation better for beginners. The official website also got a modern look to be more attractive. So also taking into account nixpkgs is probably good enough for the average user and has a good enough ecosystem around it as well, this all means NixOS has become mature enough for willing/passionate adopters (e.g. Arch users who want the next shiny tech), and who will talk about it in every given opportunity.

mindslight
At least for me, I had to try using it three separate times over the past decade for its killer features to sink in and my usage to finally stick. If my experience is common, it would explain a lot of lag in adoption.
JamesSwift
I went through the same cycle and it did finally "click" as well as mature. I now reach for it first for everything. I think the best gateway drug to actually _wanting_ to use it is nix-shebang scripts. If you get into the habit of writing your scripts with that, you will begin to really yearn for nix in other areas.
JamesSwift
I'm not sure if its actually more popular, or just showing up on HN more. I will say however, that I just clean reinstalled v2.8.0 of Nix Package Manager on 3 of my macs which were previously running a mix of 2.4-2.7 and its so much simpler to get going (shout out to @abathur who informed me they cleaned this up quite a bit, it was a real joy compared to before).

Nix with flakes is a game changer, and as flakes become more mature it lowers the bar that much more IMO. I'm now able to bootstrap a new non-nixOS system with home-manager in 2 commands (well technically 3 with the activation) and it only requires `sh` and `curl` (and I assume xcode command line tools):

    sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon
    nix build .#homeConfigurations.{computer}.activationPackage --max-jobs auto --cores $(sysctl -n hw.ncpu) && ./result/activate && rm -rf ./result
home-manager also has support for LaunchAgents now which I think makes it a complete package. The experience is very nice. I'm much more inclined to recommend it widely vs before where I hesitated to tell anyone else to adopt it unless I was ready to walk them through things and caveat some parts.