Post #1846748
2026-04-30 16:11 UTC
@jonmsterling If you are using it to manage your entire machine then yeah, it's pretty terrible...
The one thing it is useful for is as a last-resort for sandboxing builds, especially those that want to link against headers that typically get managed by your system package manager. I don't know how many times I've had projects that I've been working on break because my system package manager decided it was time to upgrade `libicu`...
Replies (2)
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@totbwf@types.pl 2026-04-30 16:17
@jonmsterling If we all decided to stop dynamic linking this would not be a problem and we could all live in bliss but alas
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@jac@types.pl 2026-04-30 16:41
@totbwf Tbh NixOS is great because any service you can imagine has a configuration option `services.foo.enable = true;` which sets it up with perfect reasonable defaults. Every configuration you could want has a flag and you never have to know how to work with whatever random bespoke config format that your one specific service has (but you can if you want). They always have an easy uninstall. The difficult thing is running random binaries off the internet, but that's usually a thing that deserves a moment of thought anyway @jonmsterling