I've recently switched to nix as a way to encode my environment across my server and work / private devices a bit more than just having some Brewfiles. I know it's not worth it for the computer switch every few years but having a somewhat opinionated place to centralize my config is worth it over regular dot files.
My first impression after a week of using:
- I really dislike the complexity of terraform, and this is very similar
- The UX is pretty bad, the commands and flags are hard to memorize and you basically need a shell alias for any regular commands to clean them up
- The commands you run regularly like applying your nix config to the system after adding some new packages or config options look like: "nix run nix-darwin -- switch --flake /Users/philipp/repos/github.com/dewey/nix#private"". The output is a mix between expected warnings and way to verbose for something that should essentially be the equivalent of "brew update / brew upgrade".
I'll stick with it as I didn't find anything better and LLMs are great for building up the config over time, but there's definitely room for some improvements.
I really want to like NixOS (and I mostly do) but the weirdness of the split between NixOS and HomeManager (and the fact that without HomeManager, you need another solution to manage your user-level configs) made it come up a bit short for me.
My first impression after a week of using:
- I really dislike the complexity of terraform, and this is very similar
- The UX is pretty bad, the commands and flags are hard to memorize and you basically need a shell alias for any regular commands to clean them up
- The commands you run regularly like applying your nix config to the system after adding some new packages or config options look like: "nix run nix-darwin -- switch --flake /Users/philipp/repos/github.com/dewey/nix#private"". The output is a mix between expected warnings and way to verbose for something that should essentially be the equivalent of "brew update / brew upgrade".
I'll stick with it as I didn't find anything better and LLMs are great for building up the config over time, but there's definitely room for some improvements.