Nix could be used to describe the nix command line program or nix the language.
Nixos is a declarative operating system built atop both of these components.
The idea of nix and Nixos for fully declarative and mostly reproducible
system management is quite appealing.
For me personally, I find more benefits in it’s system management than package management.
I’ve not really had issues with up-to-date functioning packages on Arch Linux mostly thanks to the AUR.
Because of how Nixos works many packages require workarounds or patches to overcome historical expectations about how libraries or applications are available on a system.
At some point I switched my server hosting https://git.dayl.in to use nixos.
It has worked well for system management. Crucial application packages have still been handled using docker.
But given many of the packages I use are essentially binary applications
(from go: gitea, caddy, soft-serve, from rust: lemmy) I could probably
leverage nix flakes to host these services as well.
A commit to how nim handles dlload on Nixos highlighted to me that I haven’t fully drank the kool-aid on nix.
Simply compiling nim packages that depend on openssl,
which is essentially any package interfacing with https has now changed.
It’s impossible to do so without opening a shell with access to
shared libraries.
I can see the merits for this change but it still demonstrates to me a way in which using Nixos for the forseeable future and likely for as long as it exists will require these types of cognitive shifts to a slightly different way of doing things. But of course, what’s gained particularly for applications is a less obfuscated build.
Caveat I’ve found editing my system configuration is to always err on the side of more syntactical sugar. For example when writing functions or imports add the parenthesis or brackets that indicate structure. Otherwise, you are likely to get odd recursion errors which fail to spell out the actual problem.
Adding to nixpkgs is relatively straightforward and to find out where in the stages/channels a particular PR is there is a handy online tracker.