#NixOS is this interesting middle-ground between 'near-impossible things on other distros are dead-easy in NixOS' and 'dead-easy things on other distros add friction in NixOS' 😅
@nobodyinperson the objective is given enough habit, the friction thing become frictionless at some point and you just get to do more impossible things
@nobodyinperson
eh, ideally yes, but I believe that nowadays too much tools have some form of built-in package-managing i.e. emacs packages, vscode plugins, Firefox extensions, etc...
Every tool has its rules, and sometime they are in potential conflict with the NixOS way.
Hopefully in future, there will be a common interfaces/API for controlling the packages of different environments, and then NixOS will interact also with these.
Without some help, I think that the NixOS-way can never reach the perfection, because it is hard (sometime) to imitate perfectly some complex environment.
@mzan @nobodyinperson (now of course, some folks may use tooling who doesn't have this care or effort, there's also a path of least resistance or a community of madman who will do the plumbing for everyone)
ah, I'm happy you answered according personal experience! I feared it was more wishful thinking, than personal experience 🙂
I have too much hobbies/IT-interests, and so it is more easy for me seeing non optimal support of some environments.
But I still use it, because after you configure it, it is incredible manageable, and I like it very much.
And it is improving.
@mzan @nobodyinperson well I'm quite active in nixpkgs in general :)
I contributed something me too, but very simple things. NixOS is the only distro where I was able to contribute back.
@mzan @nobodyinperson that's the good thing about nixpkgs and its scale, all you need is someone diving, taming the thing and then you get it work on nixos
I do it for everything I can and I push it, I do have large non trivial infra and usecases, I reach out to a FHS container or VM once every year