BTW original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816055 .

> His gripes on Pike's comment and industry mimicked my own.

Yeah I always found it funny that many of the ex-fishworks people don't like Pike's 2000 paper, which is essentially the same complaint as theirs but different specifics [s/(Unix|Windows)/Linux/ s/Plan 9/Illumos/]. As I think both are interesting, a set up the right direction, and not quite radical enough, I'm especially inclined to see the similarities.

> He's way overstating how much people ignore the system level...

I'm a huge fan of Galois too, I think there is a legitimate complaint that most of industry only look this far down the stack where they must, e.g.. embedded systems or real-time where desktop hardware and a mainstream linux won't do. From reading many of your past posts, I get the sense we both think different operating systems, or even hardware, should (eventually) get used all over. I get why for projects due in a year go the path of real resistance, but I think the economic argument that e.g. Google should be designed something post-unix for 15 years is pretty rock solid. And yet I don't see them or anybody else (since Midori was cancelled) doing that.

> Come on, now. Try to avoid that trap.

First of all, to be clear I responding to the OP more than what I linked. That I interpreted as infrastructure around Unix (or Windows? Haven't read up on OpenStack), not OS work or something lower level. Looking at innovation on the whole stack, I consider nix* more "silver ductape" than "silver bullet"---it made personally using Unix tolerable :).

> compatibility/legacy

So yes nix changes the way unix is administered---and if you use it without changing your ways you will miss most the benefit. At the same time nixpkgs demonstrates that it is feasible to shoehorn-in software that wasn't designed for this with few--no modifications. I think enterprise has sunk more money into their devs' Java monstrosities than ops' perl scripts, but I could be wrong here.

Also if your are running some "pre-cloud" "pre-container" "ancient" setup---on a heterogeneous pile of old desktops in a closet even!---I think nix* would actually allow one to change well than some more popular technologies.

> production worthiness, security

I don't think anybody as really audited the nix* ecosystem to the degree that some users would require, but people do use it in production.

> talent to aid deployment/support

So Nix has great fundamentals with a crappy user interface. Now maybe i am a masochistic idealist, but I think that's better than the reverse because it's easier to rewrite a misdesigned UI than misdesigned foundation.

> That's great if implemented well

It is. Sandboxing for security is a little WIP, but assuming enterprise users wouldn't install things willy-nilly, the real risk is more shitty software than malicious software, and Nix for a long time has been fully capable of dealing with the former. [And by shitty software I mean the thing being packaged. I don't know how one would fuck up the packaging itself: that either works and properly encapsulates things or doesn't work.]

> I'm barely in the debate but lean against systemd

I am completely out of the debate, but do note NixOS doesn't need systemd (or Linux!) for any fundamental reason. Indeed if we had better CI and better delegation on code review and merging PRs (my biggest gripes with nix*), I'd have expected somebody to have fixed this by now.

My personal goal (which I think is common in the community) is all the features, none of the policy. Support all distros' init etc decisions; support Linux Darwin, BSDs, Windows + MSYS2; and so on. [I actually think the Joyent people should be all over NixOS as a way to make moving between Unices painless, but they have gone with lx-branded zones for that.]