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Arch and Gentoo users reading about NixOS
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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not to mention how many things they want to go through their system. getting vim set up “their way” while also trying to install python3 support, vimtex, and plug-vim was almost impossible. not to mention finding a way to store the vim configs separately from the rest of nixos. (i use vim on multiple operating systems so switching everything to the nixos wasn’t a viable option.)
maybe there was a better way to do it that i didn’t know about, but boy did i try to find it.
you can just include dotfiles and the like in a nix config, while it's not the recommended way it usually works
in my experience installing support for most things is way easier on nix, as long as they're already packaged well. I'm still scared of the eventual time when I'll have to create my own package for the nix store to install from source
i think i would’ve probably had to package the specific kind of vim that i needed, because i wanted neovim and a gui too or something. this was also like 3-4 years ago so its possible the documentation for this kind of stuff has considerably improved since i tried, or that there are now packages that make this sort of thing easier. and it’s definitely possible everything existed at the time and i just couldn’t figure it out.
but i ended up with a similar feeling to the one you described: stuff is easy when you do it their way, using their tools; but things are very hard to do if you deviate from the path.
i know this is just sort of an inevitable part of the design paradigm they use, and that everything probably works very nicely if you learn their language and the various ins and outs of the operating system, but i just wasn’t willing to commit that much to it.
I really like most of it and started to daily drive NixOS a few months ago, but there's still some very valid criticisms to be made. Lack of documentation is probably the biggest one
i would like to give it another try at some point because it seems like it will probably feel really nice to use once i get the hang of it. but the lack of documentation is pretty rough.
i also think that for nixos, a lack of documentation is a much more difficult thing to overcome. other distros can piggyback off the arch documentation for most things, but that doesn’t work as well for nixos.
that's certainly true. I'd like to help improve the documentation, but unfortunately I'm still pretty green at Nix myself, so there's not much I can do at the moment. But it seems to be picking up speed recently, so there's hope that with more people better documentation is coming soon