nixos

after spending +3 years getting experienced and reading a lot of the source code (getting past the documentation/learning-curve problem), I can say there are at least two fundamental flaws, with nixpkgs moreso than nixos:

(Edit: Added 0)

0. The culture issue. See thread below

1. The messy mono-repo was never desgined to be searchable. It might feel searchable to a newby, but many teams have dumped tons of effort and slapped together lots of hacks to make niche-package-versions even halfway searchable. Devbox is doing a good job of fixing this, but its not there yet.

2. The monorepo design is unmaintainable/unscalable from a package maintainer standpoint. There's a ton of contributor burnout, there's no automated quality control on packages, to outsiders its not obvious how to report package-specific issues or how to edit/fix/contribute to a single package, and instead of 30min to publish a hello-world npm or cargo package, users need to make a PR on the core, and get it approved. Meaning publishing a hello-world package would get rejected anyways. The good news is flakes hub is fixing this, and I'm really excited for that.

The good is;

• The pros still outweigh the cons. My projects from 3 years ago that I haven't touched still work (0 bitrot) first try, no manual install/setup needed.
• people have put a ton of effort into nix. Its truely amazing how many things work in nix despite how absurdly difficult it is to get things working with nix
• it is pretty much as reproducable as it can be and nothing else is even remotely close.