In centuries gone past, members of the bourgeoisie would be directed by their doctors to summer homes and country estates so they could "convalesce in the countryside". It seems there was something to it, or at least there is now. (Even back then, it was explicitly about "fresh air".)
When I used to go to parties in college, I was known within my friend group for participating in multiple conversations at once, flitting from one group to another. One of my friends later told me he thought it was impressive, but in fact I just couldn't help but hear all of the conversations at once, and if multiple groups were talking about interesting things, I would find myself torn between them, and end up bouncing back and forth.
NixOS is more than 20 years old, and virtually all of the things that make it compelling were already present a decade ago. If it's not for you, you'll know after you give it a try. But for those for whom it clicks, it's desirable because it just provides a more enjoyable computing experience. It's not more complicated than that.
> Secondly, "AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those very same statements.
I do lots of Terraform work and some Nix work with LLM agents at my job. Is it worth it to rewrite a huge amount of whatever infrastructure-as-code your LLM agent generates? Hell yes; they generate way too much code and they make lots of mistakes. Are LLM agents still useful for experimentation via infrastructure-as-code? Also yes.
> Thirdly, "my entire infrastructure is defined in text files", you clearly never heard of Ansible.
I've used Ansible and Puppet at previous jobs. They don't manage state in a comparable way to NixOS. It just ain't the vibe. Domen Kozar wrote a decent blog post about the technical differences a decade ago: https://www.domenkozar.com/2014/03/11/why-puppet-chef-ansibl...
But the real reason is that those technical differences add up to a more pleasant experience for NixOS.
In my earlier days as a NixOS user, I used to get really excited with its design and how cool it is, and the neat technical properties that fall out of that (atomic upgrades! rollbacks! (and no filesystem snapshotting needed!)). I still think those things are awesome. But at the risk of feeding into your impression that "NixOS is hype", I've learned since then that the better pitch is about the subjectivity of using it: it feels good to use because experimentation is extremely cheap, reversible, transparent, and... fun. If you know, you know.
>NixOS is more than 20 years old, and virtually all of the things that make it compelling were already present a decade ago
20 years???
NixOS mention only started this year, I have been working in IT for the past 20 years, from e-commerce to banking and airline companies, I have never ever heard of NixOS.
Not until "social media influencers" started flooding YouTube with it this year.
We must be living in a completely different world then.
> We must be living in a completely different world then.
I'm not even a real Nix old-timer, but I've been using NixOS on the job for roles in IT operations and software development for more than 10 years now.
And for a few years before that, I used Nix on a personal basis as a college student.
I'm aware of the rapid growth in user interest, of course; I was there for it!
My two favorite non-fiction sections of the bookstore are dead and dying. The computer section, if it still exists, is just things like _Excel for Dummies_, and the philosophy books have all been pushed out by self help and dime-store "metaphysics".
But I've started reading programming books again recently, on my e-reader and on my laptop. People are still writing them, and they're still good. We should all go buy some!
For my own usage, I don't see chatbots as supplanting textbooks. If anything, they pair well; reading a book from cover to cover gives me the breadth and depth I want, but LLMs are there for tangents and questions that come up along the way. I was reading a book and chatting with Claude like tihs just yesterday, for a few hours.
"Green card" literally refers to US permanent residency cards; it's called that because the physical cards issued by the US are/were green. "Other contexts" are riffing on actual green cards as a metaphor, and if speakers in other contexts want to talk about legal specificities, they should use an accurate term...
You have to be either a committer in general or a maintainer of a specific package to merge PRs into Nixpkgs. Contributors' PR approvals in Nixpkgs are just an informal signal for maintainers and committers to consider. And maintainers can only merge changes related to the packages they maintain, not other random changes.
But a maintainer could merge their own PR created by a pseudonym, and signing is not required, so in effect, they can ship any changes to their own packages they wish. This is a major supply chain security risk.
Flox is a more comprehensive platform, it's proprietary, and it's designed to replace/hide Nix to some extent. Devenv is open-source and basically standalone, and uses the same kind of Nix configuration interface Nix users are used to from NixOS, Home Manager, Nix-Darwin, etc.
I like devenv a lot and use it on my team at work and for personal projects. Nobody on my team is that "into Nix" other than me, but they don't have much trouble setting up new projects with it. LLM agents are pretty good at working with it as well.
Another great tool, built on top of nix-locate, is comma. So for any program foo, if you have foo installed, you can run it like this:
foo
And if you don't have it installed, you can run it (without installing!) like this:
, foo
And if multiple different packages provide a program named bin/foo then comma lets you interactively choose the one you want, and remembers your choice so you don't have to specify again unless you choose to via the -d flag.
> virtualenv isn't relocatable out of the box, so how else would you deploy a python project?
My team has a handful of Python projects. Here's how they work:
devenv.nix provides a Python runtime and all native dependencies, git hooks for linters and things like this. It integrates with direnv and the Python package manager (currently Poetry 1.x for older projects and uv for newer ones) so that when you cd in you get a virtualenv with everything you need, scripts in the project (or stubs for them) magically appear on your PATH so you don't need to use `uv run` or whatever it is for anything.
flake.nix provides a publishable artifact for projects that we run on workstations or servers. It autogenerates a Nix package from pyproject.toml and friends. You can reproducibly build it across platforms without virtualization, you can push it up to a binary cache and avoid source builds, whatever. It's great.
For projects that we run in cloud-native containers (for us AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda), we don't currently ship our own container images. We just publish zip files that we generate with a Poetry plugin that runs builds inside containers that have the same images as are used by AWS in its default runtime environments and push them up with the AWS CLI. The exact steps are stored as a Devenv script so the CI can be a one liner and you can run everything locally just like you would in CI.
> the python community did nothing
Python sucks.
But you can still represent your Python project as a proper Python package and get reproducible-ish build artifacts that are local-first and embrace Python-native tooling and ship it up to prod in a portable format with or without Docker. It only takes one engineer spending a day or two to work it out once for the whole team or maybe the whole company. You just need someone to be willing to RTFM on a package manager or two. The Python community seems to be largely lacking such people but your team doesn't have to be.
The experience of using LLMs as digital assistants so far is not great. Gemini on Android sucks so bad it's hard to describe. It can't tell what its own capabilities are, it can't inspect the states of the apps it manipulates, it hallucinates constantly, and it needs more handholding than the crappy old decision tree to do the right thing. I much more often have to pull over to make sure Google Maps is doing the right thing than I ever used to before, because trusting the LLM to be "smarter" so often fails for me.
