nixos-and-flakes-book VS cargo-raze

I'll be honest, the first few times I tried using Nix I just couldn't get into. It was too complex for the benefits I was getting. But that was using Nix on another OS.

I recently switched to NixOS because I wanted what they were selling and the experience this time around was way better. Having no other option but to figure it out made me learn the essentials real quick (like an exchange program to a foreign country that speaks another language).

If you think about it, when you used Ubuntu or Fedora or RHEL for the first time, and probably for a very long time, you could get by without learning the deep intricacies of what is going on behind the scenes. The same is true with NixOS. The things you need to learn are different, but once you get a basic setup with home-manager setup you're off to the races. (Btw, I used this "book" to get started and it was great: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/)

The best part about using NixOS so far is that things just work. Setting up my graphics card was as simple setting enabled = true. Same for configuring specific audio frameworks. And I had tried many times to get Davinci Resolve working on other distros and always encountered issues leading me to need to dual-boot Windows so I could do video editing. Now I just enabled Davinci Resolve and it works! No more Windows.

If you're brand new to linux on the desktop, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you've been doing that for years, maybe try NixOS in 2024.

i'm new to nixos too, i found this

I found this guide really beginner friendly: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

their GH releases page has a PDF, if that helps you, or browsing around the .md files may help what I presume is your noscript browser, assuming that GH works with noscript anymore: https://github.com/ryan4yin/nixos-and-flakes-book/releases/d...

It would be useful if the wiki articles showed a 'last modified at' date. Articles like this [0] dominate search results, but it's not clear how outdated the info is. I

In case anyone is looking for an up-to-date NixOS guide/cookbook, I've found lots of value in this [1] resource.

[0] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/PulseAudio

[1] - https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

The same reason Bazel builds avoid using Cargo when building Rust software, so I'll describe why Bazel would do this:

- Bazel wants to cache remote resources, like each respective crate's source files.

- Bazel then wants to build each crate in a sandbox, and cache the build artifacts

This is an established practice, and Nix wants to drive the build for the same reasons.

See:

- https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_rust

- https://github.com/google/cargo-raze

I can make much more sense of C++ code to ensure that two build systems produce the same effect than I can parse and learn two completely unconnected programming languages deeply enough to do the same. I can unit-test core routines. I can as easily extract core logic into shared (configuration) files etc. The benefit of a standard is not to discourage alternatives but rather to agree on definitive semantics and shared and common needs (that is: in this case needs for interfaces to the compiler/linker). The implementation and general availabilty is just one of the by-product. The ability to do introspection in common terms is maybe the most consequential other product, and this is critical for 'transpiling' to other build systems and writing automated adapters such as the one that bazel is recommend for cargo's dependency management.

Cargo is not that tightly coupled with Rust. You can absolutely use bare rustc, and in fact people do that with other build systems like Bazel.

Interesting, aren't the community-driven crates for these areas satisfactory enough? There's PROST and tonic, and quite well-used. I don't know about Bazel though, but I found this. Feel free to correct me on this subject, I admit I don't know that much about it.

There is a project to generate Bazel BUILD files from Cargo.toml.