by jchw | 2025-06-08 19:32:50+00:00
> It’s so exhausting that every single time a basic use issue comes up with nix, the response is “but there’s a way to work around it (that you need tribal knowledge for and will require writing dozens to hundreds of lines of code to fix in a language that doesn’t work like any of the mainstreams with bad error messages and poorly documented standard libraries)”.

> People’s problems with nix are not that it isn’t turing-complete, it’s that it often creates more problems than it solves by refusing to provide a simple first-class API that interoperates with idiomatic projects in that ecosystem that just works.

Well, first of all, this article isn't even about the UX of using Nix directly, it is about Nixpacks, a tool built on top of Nix. If Nix already solved the problems Nixpacks were trying to solve, they would've had no reason to write it, so I don't really see how this could be relevant.

> If every project you try to use nix for devolves into centering around trying to fix issues with nix that you have to write your own modules for, why even bother using nix instead of mainstream tools with good documentation? Exactly what happened in this case. In most cases people are probably just deciding to use docker instead.

Would it matter if there was good documentation if you were not willing to read it anyway? Both of the issues I talked about actually are covered in the official Nixpkgs documentation and have been for years. For example, here is some of the documentation for layered docker images:

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#ssec-pkgs-dockerToo...

Nixpkgs and NixOS are maybe not perfectly documented, but on the other hand, they're absolutely enormous projects. The documentation that does exist is already staggering. And of course it is! Seriously, try finding a singular project that has as big of a scope as Nixpkgs...

Of course, what people seem to read from what I said is that Nix is actually perfect and there are no problems, but what I'm really saying is they didn't go into very much detail on how they tried to solve the issues they ran into. The two possibilities are that they didn't try very much, or that they did and they omitted it. The latter is certainly as plausible, but it leads to this confusing problem where their complaints don't really make much sense on their own. What I am talking about is not obscure bespoke tribal knowledge. It's pretty close to the first stuff you would learn if you read docs or tutorials.

> Nix’s refusal to address practical developer experience issues for a developer-facing product on a non-geologic timescale in favor of ideological pure flakes is rather frustrating.

> Yes, people are contributing their own time, but it’s so damn frustrating to see so much technical effort going into something that’s rendered practically unusable because of bad UX.

This really seems like it's veering far away from the discussion about Nixpacks and into personal grievances about Nix, but honestly there's thousands of build systems and package managers that don't work the way Nix does, I do not really see why Nix should compromise its ideals. for the sake of UX. But please don't get me wrong: I agree on the point that Nix has a worse UX than it could; I think the language is full of unneeded papercuts and confusing things and meanwhile the time it has taken to stabilize flakes and the new Nix command has really been a drag and introduced a lot of confusion. On the other hand, though, I'm not even sure it's worth wasting too many tears over this: as hard as it is to get started in Nix and as many things as there are that could be improved with Nix and Nixpkgs itself, really the chief pain I feel when dealing with anything involving Nix is not Nix itself but the world it exists in.

Nix has existed for over 20 years and in those years the world of OS design and package managers only really started to move towards immutability and purity relatively recently. Most software still likes to have tons of mutable, impure shared state and trying to encapsulate this into Nix can be very painful. Nix has grown many limbs and improved in many ways to try to deal with this, but it is still far and away one of the biggest sources of confusion that I have with Nix.

It is not a given that things have to work this way, but it is a natural consequence of the fact that Nix is trying to do something that is very much at odds with the way software has worked for a very long time. The impedance mismatch is massive and unavoidable, but I don't think the answer is that Nix should bend to deal with this. If someone finds what they feel is a better sweet spot between what Nix is today and the world outside of Nix, they should feel free to pursue that, but I'm involved with Nix because I think it has the right ideals just way too early.

Having dealt with systems that try to be hermetic like Bazel, you can certainly get some meaningful benefits from sitting at a midway point, but what we're chasing are the benefits you get much closer to the end-game of hermetic systems, when hermeticity is enforced strongly across the entire system. This is about more than just being a convenient tool for developers and much more into the future of how systems are designed. And yeah, sure, when you try to build on top of this in today's world, it can be awkward, nobody is denying that, but a lot of this awkwardness is, unfortunately, a feature, and while clever Nix solutions may eventually exist for some of those problems (a lot of clever work is being done, with concepts like dynamic derivations) I really feel strongly that you shouldn't hold your breath.

And sure, by all means, switch to OCI tooling if you feel like it works better. It may very well actually be better for some use cases! But you literally can not replace most of what Nix is used for and can do with OCI tooling, it's ultimately a very small subset of what Nix is capable of overall.