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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I often stumble on this example of nix usage - a one-off shell with a a specific package. This is such a niche and seemingly unimportant use case, that it’s really strange to have it mentioned so often.

    Like literally what’s the point of having a shell with ffmpeg? Why not simply install it? Even if you need something just once, just install it and then uninstall it, takes like 10 seconds.

    The other use case that is often brought up is for managing dev environments, but for a lot of popular languages (Python, Node, Java, Rust, etc. ) there are proven environment management options already (pyenv and poetry, nvm, jenv, rustup). Not to mention Docker. In the corporate setting I haven’t seen nix replacing any of these.

    From my limited experience using home manager under Linux and macOS:

    • GUI app shortcuts work in neither of the OSs
    • error messages are about as readable as the ones you get for C++ templates
    • a lot of troubleshooting searches to unsolved GitHub issues

    All in all nix seems like a pretty concept but not too practical at the moment.