fennecOS VS go-nix

I love nix, I've been using it for the last 2 years, I have a very stable setup from these 2 years of effort [0], and I just can't recommend Nix for Linux beginners, why?

Well, because everything is scattered, you have to consult many places to find out how to do things with Nix, here is my workflow:

Usually, when I need a new complex program, like Steam, I first check the system-wide configuration [1], the wiki [2] and the package list [3], if I just want it on my user, I need to check if Home Manager has an option [4], if it doesn't, I can just use the "home.packages" option. Now, if I need to override something on the package, I need to remember how to do it with [5] [6] (while checking the source code for the package in parallel to find the options).

And then sometimes, on very rare occasions, I need to fine tune something with the nix language, so I need to check the builtins/lib docs [7], but some builtins are not there, so I need to either use nix-doc [8] or find the docs inside the code-bases [9] [10] (they are split between both repos)

[0] - https://github.com/shiryel/nixos-dotfiles

There has been a bit of a pause while tazjin was exploring how to use Nix as a monorepo build system, together with Gerrit. Now that this is done, he recently started writing a new Nix interpreter that will better scale for big repos. I don't think that work is public yet.

There also has been some effort on https://github.com/nix-community/go-nix spearheaded by flokli to re-define some of the binary cache protocols. This will allow for more incremental transfers of build artefacts, reduced bandwidth and disk consumption.