alt Hacker NewsYea that's a common theme of excuses for both Rust and Nix. Wrong though, because most anyone who can use a computer at all can learn the basics of Vim.
Seeing that flake.nix badge of complexity lets me know a project will be a nightmare to set up and will break every other week. It's usually right next to the Cargo.toml badge with 400 dependencies underneath.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “a nightmare to set up”. You install Nix on your current OS with the determinate.systems installer, and you enter `nix run github:johndoe/project-containing-a-flake-dot-nix-file` to try out the project and have the full reproducible build taken care of by Nix.
Sure, installing packages the proper way requires a little bit more setup (Home Manager, most likely, and understanding where is the list of packages and which command to build to switch configuration), but as trivial as other complex tasks most of us hackers are capable of doing (like using `jq` or Vim).
Nix with Flakes never randomly break, I still have projects from 3 or 4 years ago that I can still run `nix build` and getting it running. Yes, if you try to update the `flake.lock` this may introduce breakages, but this is expected if you're pining `nixos-unstable` instead of a stable branch.
To be honest I don't know what to say, you can use nix in many ways, and you don't even require to know the language.
The easiest entry-point is to just use it like a package manager, you install nix (which is just a command...) and then you have available the whole set of packages which are searchable from here: https://search.nixos.org/packages
nix-shell is just to download&add programs temporary to your PATH.
I don't feel that this is harder than something like "sudo apt install -y xxxxx" but for sure more robust and portable, and doesn't require sudo.
If at some point you want to learn the language in order to create configurations or packaging software, it may require to check a lot more documentation and examples, but for this I think it's pretty straightforward and is not harder than any other package manager like aptitude, homebrew or pacman.