this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Nix / NixOS
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Flakes should never have happened the way that they did IMHO. The situation it's left the project in is awful. It's stuck. They can't move forward and accept flakes because they undermine some fundamental things. They can't move backwards and remove them or even make breaking changes because they're in such widespread use.
When I looked into nix a year or two ago I was directed to use flakes by half of the documentation while the other half told me to not to use them since they were experimental. Ended up going back to what I knew, since, you know, installing things was a pretty solved problem.
As someone who hasn't touch base with Nix for a long time: what are "flakes"?
flakes, in the most basic terms, is a solution to "well it works on my machine".
So say you develop something within a flake, you can then take that flake and reproduce it 100% on whatever machine you choose. so what ever your building in it if it worked on your machine, it's going to work on all machines.
It's also good for configuring your NixOS. your configs are within the flake and if something happens to your system or you want to replicate your system completely on another machine you can. i.e. you push your nixos config to a git repo and then you can clone it where ever and now you have your complete OS setup somewhere else. Like say if your system borks and you need to reinstall Arch or Ubuntu or whatever it will take awhile to get it set up completely has you had it before. With NixOS and Flakes it's like 10minutes tops to get back to where you were.
TL;DR lockfile with inputs (deps like nixpkgs) and consumable outputs (packages, shells, system)
I like flakes. They solve several problems and are convenient. Only oddity ive hit is that theyre a subset of the nix language. What am I missing? What would forward look like?
Have a read of the thoughts of somebody with closer ties than myself.