A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don’t get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that’s actually build for the task.
That is something you can’t quite escape in Nix either. While it doesn’t use parenthesis like a Lisp, the nature of the language and the depths of the sets you are dealing with still makes you end up getting a lot of this at the end of your files:
];
};
};
};
}
Having one } too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.
Check out Guix_System_Distribution, it’s just like NixOS but uses a Scheme dialect which is a better language.
While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don’t get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that’s actually build for the task.
If you like parentheses anyway
That is something you can’t quite escape in Nix either. While it doesn’t use parenthesis like a Lisp, the nature of the language and the depths of the sets you are dealing with still makes you end up getting a lot of this at the end of your files:
]; }; }; }; }Having one
}too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.