After daily driving NixOS and the Nix pm for almost three years, it feels like it’ll be simplified by entities external to the project. It’s still in that academic phase (don’t do this/that) and needs software engineering asap.

That usually involves reducing boilerplate ruthlessly while generalizing/capturing fundamental uses cases (setting implicit best current practices). It’s reminiscent of lxc just before docker arrived for the masses.

btw this blog is served to you by NixOS :-)

Surely typing/saying the below Alpine command to install Firefox is way easier than who knows what multi–stage process other operating systems require.

apk add firefox

Google’s search box (rather tongue in cheek) is the most popular command line interface in use today. With NLP, installing and running firefox would just be a phrase equivalent that compiles to:

firefox

On NixOS, we can already do stuff like that. Of course, NixOS lacks a translation/encapsulation layer for imperative to declarative specification — so user friendliness suffers dramatically.

It’s kinda odd being able to remember what things were like before Docker appeared. Docker is the software developer’s take on creating a Linux distribution. It’s useful, but the indirection of containers and pinning can be deadly. Avoiding unnecessary indirection is advantageous.

I’m just now realizing that there might be a schism within the Nix/NixOS ecosystem/community on old versus new interfaces. If that’s remotely true, then somewhere, a great holy war is at play. Here’s an article summary of the old versus the new interface that I stumbled upon recently.