HN Reader

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.

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).

Every time I hear about Nix I get pretty excited, and then there are folks in the comments that say things along the lines of, "It's great, except when it doesn't work because of some missing package/Flake, and then it's hell and there is no 'escape hatch'". It's the lack of escape hatch that scares me. What if I want to install/configure something that hasn't been Nix-ified? Do you find yourself fighting with it to do something "simple"?

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.

Happy to answer any questions!

AI + Nix is indeed amazing!

https://github.com/utensils/mcp-nixos

Highly recommend this + nix flake check for best results.

You have reached goal state of what I'm getting at here:

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.

And just imagine the world where Nix has a rich powerful type system and has dedicated support global configuration flags (aka useflags, aka axes).

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