<story><title>NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally</title><url>https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bongobingo1</author><text>Ive always loved the idea of nix, but feel like I&amp;#x27;ve read numerous, if not horror, at least uncomfortable stories about the actual real-world experience after the initial &amp;quot;setup yak shaving&amp;quot; is done - which is often exciting for &amp;quot;us&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s the new project problem solving part before it falls into the boring &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; part.&lt;p&gt;If I have an arch system now, how useful is it to use Nix or Homemanager on a non-nixos &lt;i&gt;linux&lt;/i&gt; system? I dont really want to dump a working system and duel booting always has whatever you need on the other system.&lt;p&gt;Do you &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; anything when not using NixOS to manage &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt;? What good is it if half my system is installed by pacman, half by asdf-per-project and the rest by nix? Has anyone gone down this route? What is the actual lived experience of half-assing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nextos</author><text>It can get you two major things. Docker-like reproducibility for any development project in a much more convenient way. And the ability to try lots of software &lt;i&gt;without&lt;/i&gt; installing it.&lt;p&gt;For me, the last one is a gamechanger, as I am no longer worried about littering my system with tons of dependencies. Say I want to convert an eBook I downloaded. I can quickly use Calibre for a one-off thing, with nix run nixpkgs#calibre.</text></comment>
<story><title>NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally</title><url>https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bongobingo1</author><text>Ive always loved the idea of nix, but feel like I&amp;#x27;ve read numerous, if not horror, at least uncomfortable stories about the actual real-world experience after the initial &amp;quot;setup yak shaving&amp;quot; is done - which is often exciting for &amp;quot;us&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s the new project problem solving part before it falls into the boring &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; part.&lt;p&gt;If I have an arch system now, how useful is it to use Nix or Homemanager on a non-nixos &lt;i&gt;linux&lt;/i&gt; system? I dont really want to dump a working system and duel booting always has whatever you need on the other system.&lt;p&gt;Do you &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; anything when not using NixOS to manage &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt;? What good is it if half my system is installed by pacman, half by asdf-per-project and the rest by nix? Has anyone gone down this route? What is the actual lived experience of half-assing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pkulak</author><text>I don’t know the value of half-assing it, but committing your full ass is amazing. Don’t abandon a working system, but the next time you wait a whole three weeks to pacman -syu and your GPG keys are out of date and everything goes to hell… give it a shot.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it’s Home Manager that really adds the maximum value, and getting all the way there takes a full weekend, but what were you gonna do anyway?</text></comment>