Nix is not worth it if all you want is configuring your home computer. The learning curve is steep and has a tall onboarding cliff.

The only way you get positive ROI from Nix is either you enjoy the journey, or you use it to do more than just managing a single computer: you manage a fleet, you build thin application container images, you bundle all your software, you have devshells, repeatable tests and deploys, etc. It's the same tool for all of them.

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kombine 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's worth it for me. I learnt and set up my home manager config once in 2024 and I now only occasionally make light tweaks. But I deploy it on every personal computer or remote development servers at my jobs (previous and current). Granted, I'm probably one of the handful of people in my community who uses nix, because it's too arcane - but I've already paid the cost.

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rgoulter 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right.

Nix is a wonderful technology. But I would not argue it is practical if you can afford "just fix it when it breaks". A nix setup more/less requires you to pay all the cost up front.

I appreciate putting in the effort now so that I don't have to later for stuff like declarative dev environments. It's really nice to not have to copy-and-paste installation instructions from a README. -- I did like the point: until you've felt what a comfortable design is, you cannot imagine it.

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fnordlord 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I'm a Nix user and fan but I'm still going to be stuck fixing it when it breaks. The biggest thing that I have to remind myself is that reproducible != "just works." Once you get to what you want, you're set but until then and every change after, there's a chance you'll be in the weeds.

At least from my usage, the fact that your configuration is all tied to whether the entirety of nixpkgs-unstable is working can be a real headache. Like recently when CMake was upgraded to 4.0, it took down a healthy handful of packages, which meant you couldn't update anything until things were resolved or you were really fluent in Nix hackery. (I was the former)

	▲	nothrabannosir an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have sworn off nixpkgs-unstable for basically anything but testing. I’m now on the 6 months stable release cadence and never going back. Much much better experience. Unstable really is unstable. And that’s great! But it’s not for me.