My Nix Journey
Published: 2024-03-16 (427 days ago)
Introduction
The appeal of Nix and NixOS to me were the promise of single configuration to rule them all, by in large that is true but it comes with some caveats that are external to Nix itself.
The problems are many and are known, the learning curve is steep with no obvious ways to even start tackling it.
The good parts of the ecosystem is how supportive community is, I can not recall an incident where I asked in a community channel such as Matrix and was met with silence or discouragement, everyone is supportive and helpful.
The Missing Parts
Documentation
The Nix documentation is lackluster at best and non-existent at worse.
One of the worst offenders is the VFIO page which just points to the Arch wiki which would be great for any other distribution but not much for NixOS. The accompanying gist is well
I was lucky to stumble upon a tutorial that used Flakes as my first introduction
into Nix, I only discovered later the mess with nix-env and friends, all lacking
proper docs or a mention in the official documentation.