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Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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NixOS sounds amazing in some regards, but I'm not really interested in learning a whole programming language for it... I have enough to do already.
The nix package manager can be used on any os and doesn't require usage of the nix programming language..
Note that Nix is not a full-blown programming language, it's an expression language. The end result of an expression is always data and side-effects are not possible; you can't do network requests or write to arbitrary files. There is no such thing as a variable in Nix either, only constants. You can think of it like JSON with (pure) functions and an additional data type (~package).
From a user perspective, it's really not very different from any of the other 100s of weird configuration syntaxes you've surely come across in your Linux journey.
My nixos-config is a bit more complex because I like to reap the benefits that abstraction but here's a simpler section that is representative of how a typical NixOS desktop config would look like:
https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/ee2d85dc3665ae3cad463a3eb132f806651fe436/modules/desktop/module.nix#L16-L77
(Though note that even this is slightly more complex than what you'd do when starting out; ignore the LADSPA_PATH and tablet conditional for now.)
Did OP mention nixos at some point?
No, but the top-level comment you're replying to is a perfect response for the OP because of what it demonstrates.