Nix is poised to win the future of cloud infrastructure, but critical obstacles remain. A 3-year production story on the promise, the pain, and the concrete path forward for Nix.
Nix has one great idea and one terrible idea. Until at least the configuration language is redesigned by someone with good taste (and sanity), I’m not touching it. The amount of effort it takes to get back into the nix headspace in order to maintain anything is just not worth it. Docker and Podman are trivial by comparison, and the benefits of Nix do not justify the headaches. I Nix on a personal server for a few months, but migrated back to Podman after I found myself spending way too much time trying to find documentation and make sense of crackhead JSON.
In my work I get to use Conan which kind of implements some of the same ideas as Nix/Guix. It’s designed for a different use case, but the benefits are similar and I love using it. It also has a learning curve, but Python is a real programming language at least. Guix may have the right idea too, but my experience with FSF projects is that they choose ideology over practicality every time, so I’m not eager to dive into it.
Nix has one great idea and one terrible idea. Until at least the configuration language is redesigned by someone with good taste (and sanity), I’m not touching it. The amount of effort it takes to get back into the nix headspace in order to maintain anything is just not worth it. Docker and Podman are trivial by comparison, and the benefits of Nix do not justify the headaches. I Nix on a personal server for a few months, but migrated back to Podman after I found myself spending way too much time trying to find documentation and make sense of crackhead JSON.
In my work I get to use Conan which kind of implements some of the same ideas as Nix/Guix. It’s designed for a different use case, but the benefits are similar and I love using it. It also has a learning curve, but Python is a real programming language at least. Guix may have the right idea too, but my experience with FSF projects is that they choose ideology over practicality every time, so I’m not eager to dive into it.