nylOct 18, 2023

What do you dislike about Nix/NixOS?

https://lemmy.opensupply.space/post/7725

What do you dislike about Nix/NixOS? - Open Supply

Could be areas of improvement as well

Show threadjeffhykinOct 19, 2023

after reading a lot of the source code and spending +3 years getting experienced, I can say there are at least two fundamental flaws:

  • The messy mono-repo was never desgined to be searchable (many teams have dumped tons of effort and slapped together lots of hacks to make niche-package-versions even halfway searchable). Devbox is doing a good job of fixing this, but its not there yet.
  • The monorepo design is unmaintainable/unscalable from a package maintainer standpoint. There’s a ton of contributor burnout, there’s no real quality control on packages, to outsiders its not obvious how to report package-specific issues or how to edit/fix/contribute to a single package, and instead of 30min to publish a hello-world npm or cargo package, users need to make a PR on the core, and get it approved. Meaning publishing a hello-world package would get rejected anyways. The good news is flakes hub is fixing this, and I’m really excited for that.

    • The good is;

    • people have put a ton of effort in. Its truely amazing how many things work in nix despite how absurdly difficult it is to get things working with nix
    • it is pretty much as reproducable as it can be and nothing else is even remotely close.
    Show threadnyl
    How do you see these solutions by third-party? Doesn’t that likely lead to go far away from the community and do commercialization and proprietary solutions?
    Oct 19, 2023 at 4:19amWeb
    Show threadjeffhykinOct 19, 2023

    I worry some about devbox being closed source with their package indexing soltuion. I talked with them on a video call and they seem like great guys. And they said they’d pull the indexing part out of their private repo and make it open source so I could help work on it. They openly talked about their design and have blog posts about too. But that was 2 maybe 3 months ago and I still haven’t heard back. I should maybe ping them. The real downside is they’ve got an unusual amount of “lock in”, like devbox is not a tool that enhances nix, its just a tool that uses nix under the hood.

    Flakes hub, by Determinate Systems, I have absolutely 0 concern about. They’re truely just enhancing nix, and even if they dissapeared the packages already on flakeshub would still effectively work because they’re distrubuted. Flakeshub is just a registry for standarized searching of flakes by individual people. Publishing is built on top of github actions which I’m not the biggest fan of. But there are ways of running github actions locally.