I can relate, I was all in on Nix for a while (and it’s still the best Linux IMO) but I’m a bit afraid of the complexity of the whole stack in an extended global economic downturn.

That said: the main fear here probably comes from the enormous size of nixpkgs and the overall cost of the infrastructure. Most individual package definitions should be relatively easy to maintain. So perhaps it isn’t such a big deal, if Nix infra built packages more slowly and reduced the scope of the repo then it could probably cope with having fewer maintainer hours available and less funding.

Still, something about it feels like a Tower of Babel situation. It goes just far enough beyond most people’s understanding to feel like it has fractal complexity. (Although it really isn’t that bad once you’ve spent enough time with it.)

These days I am more interested in simple, self-contained systems like OpenBSD than impressive feats of engineering. I still prefer Nix for most “work stuff”.

But why don't we ask Claude to design a more sane version of Nix? And translate all the Nix files (or whatever they're called) to this user-friendly version?

Or just document things well enough that they are explained and can be re-created from scratch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

c.f.,

http://literateprogramming.com/

Last month I bought a flet.dev subscription (and tokens 3 times over --- the recent update seems to be far more efficient in terms of what one gets for a given token spend?) and have been using it to try to make some small apps for CNC work and I am currently dismantling one based on converting the generated .md documentation and re-writing it with the source code inserted at appropriate places and with added commentary and documentation and links --- I'm confident that when I'm done I'll have a tool which I understand and which if need be, could be re-created w/o AI help, or ported to some different UI toolkit/build system.

Just wanted to chime in and say that is a very good talk, and I recommend people give it the time.

Disagree. Whether it’s Raspbian on a Pi, or Fedora or Mint on a modern laptop, issues still occur, and any minor issue immediately launches you into the world of the terminal, Google, StackOverflow, and Ubuntu forums.

Claude has definitely helped to reduce this negative!

> Some of us (myself included) cannot resist tinkering with something that works reasonably well. When we use Windows its hard to tinker so we leave well along. Linux lets you tinker so we keep trying to reach perfection, and that breaks stuff.

I think that tinkering serves a purpose. If you don't fully understand your tooling, you won't be able to fix it when something breaks. Tinkering teaches you that.

Also, you might miss out on improved workflow by leaving things alone.

The whole reason I use FOSS is that I don't some big tech architect to decide for me how my computer should work.

IMO most of linux issues come from "my distro ancient package registry does not have package X, let me google magic commands I need to run to installed version I need"

If I have issue with nixos, its 99 out of 100 times going to be package I pulled either from nixpkgs-unstable or 3d party flake.

NixOS make it less of a problem because I can alwasy switch to previous generation and build all of my hosts before switching any of them.

Some distros are worse then others though. Ubuntu (used to?) for some reasons loved switching nvidia drivers OSS version that does not work every update or break keyboard layout switcher. I never had such issues with NixOS, but with NixOS I have "kernel updated, reboot required" issue that I had setup alert for[1].

[1]: Only issue on a host that has nvidia card because nvidia being nvidia.

On windows I assume I cannot bend the OS to my will. On Linux I know I should be able to. The biggest issue is I am often so busy asking if I can do it that I don't stop to ask if I should do it. So I end up with weird configurations and random packages installed to tweak stupid stuff.

Some of it is real pain points, and those are annoying that they aren't baked into the distro from the beginning.

I only do tinkering once. After that, it usually stays that way for as long as the option/setting exists and doesn't break.

For example, in 1996 I tweaked the buttons on Total Commander's main button bar (was called Windows Commander back then). I still use that same button bar today, 30 years later. Only some icons had to be replaced. I try to do the same in Linux, but...

There are some programs where this just doesn't work. Firefox for example has a bad habit of deprecating settings and adding new ones (with wrong defaults, because... money probably). It needs tinkering all the time.

But I love tinkering!

curiosity is good

Yes. It is a shame they didn't use an established programming language and instead developed their own esoteric one—the same kind of issues as CMake, for example. I still don't understand why I should use a custom, crappy language to build C++ projects cross-platform. And the tragic part is that nothing else offers better functionality.

Guix :) It's a shame its package coverage is nowhere near NixPkgs, because it's so much nicer to read and write. I guess eventually we'll have "Compile-to-Nix" languages, seemingly these sort of languages tend to crop up after a while for languages with lets say "harder UX".

You expect Linux to work on anything you deicde install it on. That is the wrong approach. Get hardware that is well supported, then Linux works well too.

It’s less scary because when an LLM messes up, you can roll back its changes, which is much easier to do in NixOS, as opposed to other Linux distros where you have to take filesystem snapshots.

In my experience LLMs tend to work far better when they have a tree of structured information to search through and change.

Compared to poking at a mungy ball of accidental state where every change introduces complexity for the future which every downstream agent needs to correctly find.

Remember when we were told only an expert should install Linux, and everyone else should just ask an enthusiast for help? Well, now we all have an expert at hand. Might not be a world expert, up to date in the very latest changes, but more than enough to make a lot of things that seemed impossible doable.

It's the same as it ever was. You go for Windows and macOS for cohesive defaults. You go for Linux for agility. Agility comes at a cost, but it's now lower than ever before, as NixOS + the agents are the closest you can come to `import antigravity`[0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/353/