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0 pointsmadjam0024y ago0 comments

I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more.

In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon. It helped looking at the syntax to start with as “hmm this is a bit like JSON” and to worry about things like lazy evaluation later on. I guess it helped that I was familiar with JSONNET beforehand so maybe that helped.

My first few servers I got by with just a basic understanding of the language and copying/pasting examples from the website and using https://search.nixos.org/options

Using on a desktop, now that is a whole other experience. I personally quite enjoy it for my desktop but there is definitely more of a learning experience and you might not find the benefits of Nix worth it anyway as your desktop is an always changing environment.

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ayushnix4y ago

> I hear you, Nix definitely does feel slow and I must day over the few years I’ve been using it it has definitely slowed down even more.

I don't know about others but once you become used to package managers like pacman and apk, it's a jarring experience to use apt and dnf, especially dnf. And Nix feels just as slow, if not slower, than all of them.

I have to install hundreds of MBs of metadata before I can install a package with dnf and the fastestmirror=true has essentially been useless in the history of my years of usage of dnf. The end result is me downloading hundreds of megs at speeds less than 1MBps.

> In terms of the DSL, I’m really surprised that people find it a problem as much as they do. When I first tried Nix I moved my first nonprod server over to it that very afternoon.

I find it much easier to use a combination Ansible, python/shell scripts, and dotfiles on multiple git forges. This setup may not be as declarative as NixOS but it is much easier to grok and use. I have no motivation to learn an obscure DSL to manage my system.

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