Hey, author here, the blog post takes you through my journey with nix so far: reviving an old Pixelbook with NixOS, wrangling my MacBook with nix-darwin, and super-charging Nix with AI to solve a problem I thought was unsolvable.
Do you know about any good/current blogs on Nix and flakes and home manager that ELI5 this stuff and don't involve banging my head against the wall? Plz say yes...
Do you think a "batteries-included" NixOS install could be developed for users like me? I feel like a NixOS with libreoffice, zoom, etc. could be a drop-in windows11 replacement for a lot of users.
Maybe the key feature would be a graphical installer; something that presents an app-store iterative-install UI and in the background handles configuration.nix, so nontechnical users don't have to use the terminal or wrap their head around declarative config / version control to get a reproducible desktop that they can simply install on new machines.
I’ve been configuring my Framework laptop with NixOS for a few years. The original premise of a reproducible OS was really appealing, but I’ve definitely run into drawbacks. The main one is that everything seems to take forever if you’re not using Nix every day, you lose the “muscle memory”quickly.
Also, while LLMs are great for coding, they’re still not very good at writing Nix.
About LLMs not being very good at Nix, I disagree.
I went from not having written a single line of Nix to a full fledged repo with multiple mac’s, multiple NixOS hosts with impermanence, the whole lot in a couple months with remarkable speed with claude code.
Mind you I had decades of infra and dev experience behind me as well as experience with claude code and LLMs in general.
I think that in the right experienced hands they’re a great tool for becoming up to speed and productive.
I'm stuck on an nVidia Jetson system (which is Ubuntu based) and using Nix with the vendor supplied CUDA etc. is a disaster. Sadly, it is not possible to install other distributions either.
So while I'm happy for those who can run Nix, keep in mind that it is not a universally available path to nirvana (liberation from suffering).
The one downside to nix that I've found is that nix rebuilds with flakes are incredibly slow. I'm using determinate nix too on nixos and it's still sooo slow
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] threadHappy to answer any questions!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160603
Do you think a "batteries-included" NixOS install could be developed for users like me? I feel like a NixOS with libreoffice, zoom, etc. could be a drop-in windows11 replacement for a lot of users.
Maybe the key feature would be a graphical installer; something that presents an app-store iterative-install UI and in the background handles configuration.nix, so nontechnical users don't have to use the terminal or wrap their head around declarative config / version control to get a reproducible desktop that they can simply install on new machines.
Also, while LLMs are great for coding, they’re still not very good at writing Nix.
I went from not having written a single line of Nix to a full fledged repo with multiple mac’s, multiple NixOS hosts with impermanence, the whole lot in a couple months with remarkable speed with claude code.
Mind you I had decades of infra and dev experience behind me as well as experience with claude code and LLMs in general.
I think that in the right experienced hands they’re a great tool for becoming up to speed and productive.
So while I'm happy for those who can run Nix, keep in mind that it is not a universally available path to nirvana (liberation from suffering).
https://github.com/utensils/mcp-nixos
Highly recommend this + nix flake check for best results.