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.

This blog is really really good for robust usage of Nix/NixOS. I stumble upon it every so often. Another excellent blog is “How to Learn Nix” which explores in excruciating detail the painful parts of nix and its documentation. Discovered that one recently.