alt Hacker News> you can just write your own module, and the module system lets you disable existing modules if you need to
That sounds about 100x more difficult to me
Replies
hombre_fatal • last Saturday at 6:51 PM
I've written a dozen flakes because I want some niche behavior that the home-manager impl didn't give me, and I just used an LLM and never opened Nix docs once.
It's just declarative configuration, so you also get a much better deliverable at the end than running terminal commands in Arch Linux, and it ends up being less work.
I can see your point that it can be daunting to have all the pain upfront. When I was using Ubuntu on my servers it was super simple to get things running
The problem was when I had to change some obscure .ini file in /etc for a dependency to something new I was setting up. Three days later I'd realise something unrelated had stopped working and then had to figure out which change in the last many days caused this
For me this is at least 100x more difficult than writing a Nix module, because I'm simply not good at documenting my changes in parallel with making them
For others this might not be a problem, so then an imperative solution might be the best choice
Having used Nix and NixOS for the past 6-7 years, I honestly can't imagine myself using anything than declarative configuration again - but again, it's just a good fit for me and how my mind works