Julia Evanssome notes on nix flakes https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/11/notes-on-nix-flakes/
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta@b0rk nix is fascinating but… do you have a post on what it is? It’s a package manager afaict. But people talk about it like it’s something more?
@reconbot the weird thing is that you can just use nix to install system packages (like apt or homebrew), but you can also configure ANYTHING with it (like all of your config files etc and ruby packages etc) and there's an entire Linux distribution called NixOS that uses nix for all system configuration
does that help at all?
@b0rk It does open more conceptual boxes! 😂 But yeah.
Why would you want to use nix to manage configuration files?
@reconbot i'm not sure. I have friends who do it but it's not that appealing to me personally.
I think it's related to the "dotfiles repo" trend where you put all your config files in a repo and somehow keep them versioned, like this person talks about https://www.webpro.nl/articles/getting-started-with-dotfiles
I'm not into that either though, I made https://github.com/jvns/dotfiles 11 years ago and stopped using it pretty quickly
@reconbot I guess for me the appeal 10 years ago was to have a similar dev setup on my personal machine and work machine, but actually in practice they diverged a lot over time and it felt too annoying to try to keep them in sync in any meaningful way
Maciek Flak@flakm nix is just SO confusing to me in general and I just refuse to add any more layers of abstraction to my nix config because I already barely understand how it works
@b0rk Oh yes it's absolutely a mess. My perspective definitely is a survivor bias. I think what got me through was the fact that in many cases I've had almost zero previous experience so I've actually learned them through nix lens (configuring vim or zsh).
Funny to see this topic touched here and on yesterday's Linux unplugged episode. I'm sure the community interest and investment from companies will result in better accessibility.
@b0rk I’m setting up a new work machine and I’m starting with my dot files because it’s a nicer default than the actual default, past that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯