As someone who tried NixOS recently for the first time, it feels like an uphill battle.
Some immediate concerns I have as a newbie are below. Bear in mind that I'm a single user on a single system.
Organisation is daunting as fuck
Even a relatively simple desktop config seems rather large to me. I expect the complexity of my config to balloon if I were to use this as my primary OS. There seems to be no consensus on how things should be separated.
I've heard home-manager is good, but I don't really get the point of it. What does it achieve for me that editing configuration.nix doesn't? I've yet to find a benefit. It's just another place to dump endless configs and another command to remember to run.
Installing software feels like the roll of a dice
I installed NixOS to try Hyprland, and their docs say to just use programs.hyprland.enable = true, which I've come to learn is a module. But that's not the only way to install things! You also have system packages and user packages! I just want to install some software, I don't want to have to look up whether it's a module or a package every time I want something new. I'm never sure what I should add to which section. No other distro that I know of has this problem! Having 3 different places to add software seems excessive. What am I using? Windows? And now there's Flakes too. I'm sure they're great, but right now I just see them as yet another way to install software on Nix. Great.
There's more, but I'll leave it there for now. I'm sure there are reasonable answers to all that I've said, but I'm just frustrated. I really want to like Nix, but it's not making it easy.
tl;dr: Two things. 1) Lack of consensus on how configs are organised is confusing. 2) Having 3 different ways of installing software (modules/packages/flakes) does not feel better than apt install or pacman -Syu etc.
I come to news sites to read articles, not watch videos. If I wanted to watch videos I would go to YouTube. It's as simple as that.
Making them autoplay is just adding insult to injury (as well as wasting bandwidth for literally no reason).
Let's do some napkin maths while we think how much energy has been wasted by autoplaying a video for every visitor.
If I were to guess, the video player pre-caches a few seconds of content, maybe up to 10. That's a fair few MB worth of reasonable quality video/audio data. Now multiply that for every single visitor. That's a lot of wasted energy. The page itself is likely ~1MB in size (at least you'd hope), so they're potentially increasing their costs by an order of magnitude by having the videos autoplay.
With the prevalence of generative AI, it's becoming more and more difficult to trust an image (and soon videos will follow), so how will people verify themselves? Not many people will want to hand over their government-issued ID to a random company.
Even if that wasn't an issue, how would the service survive? What would be the monetisation strategy (assuming good will)?
You can code in Notepad in the same way you can eat off the floor with your hands. Using better tools is a nicer experience.
As for performance, when one of the world's most popular editor runs on Electron, it's not that hard to see why performance could be an issue when working on large projects on older hardware.
I've never personally had an issue with VSCode's performance, but I'm also fortunate enough to be in a position where I can afford a relatively modern machine. Many others have to make do with what they have, which is why Zed might appeal to them.
I am a software developer and gamer who lives in his mother's basement and watches anime.
In my defense: I am in the process of buying my own house, I practice good hygiene, and I do have a social life (unlike a stereotypical basement-dweller). I have no excuse for the anime, that's on me.
Consider all the gamers with more money than sense buying 4090s for the price of cars and, more importantly, many companies buying datacenter cards for their next generative AI project (not that I think many of them will last).
I don't see Nvidia running out of money any time soon.
I had that moment when learning to code. I had like 98% or what I needed to know. Then one day I came across some random SO post, learned something that I really should have learned a while ago (the difference between static classes and instantiated classes, yes really) and then everything just fell into place and I realised I could actually write proper code now. It was a fun moment :)
As someone who tried NixOS recently for the first time, it feels like an uphill battle.
Some immediate concerns I have as a newbie are below. Bear in mind that I'm a single user on a single system.
Organisation is daunting as fuck
Even a relatively simple desktop config seems rather large to me. I expect the complexity of my config to balloon if I were to use this as my primary OS. There seems to be no consensus on how things should be separated.
I've heard home-manager is good, but I don't really get the point of it. What does it achieve for me that editing configuration.nix doesn't? I've yet to find a benefit. It's just another place to dump endless configs and another command to remember to run.
Installing software feels like the roll of a dice
I installed NixOS to try Hyprland, and their docs say to just use
programs.hyprland.enable = true
, which I've come to learn is a module. But that's not the only way to install things! You also have system packages and user packages! I just want to install some software, I don't want to have to look up whether it's a module or a package every time I want something new. I'm never sure what I should add to which section. No other distro that I know of has this problem! Having 3 different places to add software seems excessive. What am I using? Windows? And now there's Flakes too. I'm sure they're great, but right now I just see them as yet another way to install software on Nix. Great.There's more, but I'll leave it there for now. I'm sure there are reasonable answers to all that I've said, but I'm just frustrated. I really want to like Nix, but it's not making it easy.
tl;dr: Two things. 1) Lack of consensus on how configs are organised is confusing. 2) Having 3 different ways of installing software (modules/packages/flakes) does not feel better than
apt install
orpacman -Syu
etc.