What I don’t understand: He writes about 21 years of experience and having made 150k/year. Where is all that money? How can you make 150k and work for two decades and not have any savings/investments to stay afloat even if that means moving to a more remote and cheaper area?
The code of the packages is the documentation. So the newcomers better start learning Nix language and reading the paper about how Nix works under the hood before they get started! /s
But seriously, I used NixOs for about 2 years almost 10 years ago and while it was/is fascinating when you have everything setup, getting there and maintaining everything across so many packages that each have their own way of configuring them took hundreds of hours. I’m back on Arch using a custom tool I wrote to fully manage my configs, packages, dotfiles etc.
The way I remember it is that there is no consistency across Nix packages and it all feels like a giant puzzle for people who enjoy spending time configuring more than actually using the computer. And I say that as someone who actually enjoyed getting into that when I had unlimited time.
And saves both energy and water.
Do yourself a favor and mark which side is which
That reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/Ni1RPc5OU2c
But why if the customer didn’t need any support and didn’t cause any cost on your side? In B2B you are often paying for the actual customer support, no?
How is it fair to not need any support and then have to pay for past months of smooth operation to get (security?) updates?
But to be fair, Nix is not the only answer to that. There are lots of tools for just dotfiles but you can also build something using e.g. ansible to manage everything.
All my computers have their config in a git repo. That includes users, packages, services, dotfiles, /etc configs and so on. I used ansible before writing my own tool. I can install Arch from scratch and only need to partition, run one script and then apply my config on first boot using my tool to have my system restored. I know it’s not as declarative and absolute/reproducible as Nix, but it works and it’s way less painful than my last attempt at giving NixOS a go.