With all due respect to Nix/Guix, to me they swim uphill against the current of "worse is better" than UNIX is built upon. They are trying to tame the complexity of the world by making it declarative. A lofty, and a little too idealistic goal.
I much prefer the immutable approach (rpm-ostree) or even an unsophisticated approach like a Dockerfile, which is worse but much closer to the status quo, than to create a perfect world from scratch and hope that everybody follows the Light. Software is too large, complex, hacky, buggy and nuanced to expect it to fit into neat preordained categories. Because unless you do very simple things, you'll soon find yourself out of the happy path and have to resort to doing the hacky way anyway.
This is what some believe killed Lisp machines vs UNIX. I guess, like Lisp, in decades there will a vocal contingent of people lamenting the fact that we all run immutable Microsoft Kubernetes Ubuntu (MSKU) instead of using the more refined NixOS approach.
>> in decades there will a vocal contingent of people lamenting the fact that we all run immutable Microsoft Kubernetes Ubuntu (MSKU) instead of using the more refined NixOS approach.
You are, unfortunately, correct. Some of us still run illumos Unix (SmartOS), but we are a tiny minority. I hope that things can work out so that something other than the lowest common denominator is accessible enough to also have a pervasive footprint.
A lot of very crummy ideas are popular in ways that would not have been imaginable 15 years ago.
>> or even an unsophisticated approach like a Dockerfile
In a handful of "higher end" on the salary side of DevOps/SRE roles I have done, I managed to quietly do things with flake.nix -- next time around I'll do them with Guix. I can get Guix container images going, that's not hard for me.
But yeah, doing things non-Docker isn't too hard for us DevOps ninjas (what DevOps was in 2012, not the watered down thing today).
After doing flake.nix, I managed to get written company policy ratified by our legal team that all container images must be binary reproducible. That probably fell apart since I left, unless the high quality CTO I was serving is still there.
I am not sure if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment that's above my comedic pay grade, but if it is not:
This sounds like a lot of words that would otherwise mean nothing to any Nix/Guix user. It works. It is not "too idealistic goal", Nix repositories already contain more packages than any distribution around.
It is too late to throw the occasional uninspiring "you are too ambitious." Because they have been doing this for years now successfully.
I think the question is about what kind of commitment the functional package management paradigm, especially as implemented by Nix and Guix, requires too much commitment or skill to really 'eat the world'.
That whole operating systems based on this model are workable by enthusiasts, experts, and adventurous hackers is, as you point out, well-proven by NixOS and (perhaps especially, by your reckoning) GuixSD.
Personally, while I think later, 'more pragmatic' takes on functional package management (e.g., Spack) get some things right for the first time in the space, I'm optimistic about how far projects like NixOS and Guix can go even without relaxing any 'purity' constraints. NixOS is blowing up with Linux hobbyists right now because there's already so much it can do without experienced administrator. The Guix package collection is growing incredibly quickly given its relative youth and smaller contributor base— I'd be shocked if it didn't outgrow some of the most popular Linux distros in the next few years.
Like you say, these projects aren't just proofs of concept in a lab or paper somewhere. They have users and contributors right here in the real world, already, and they're growing and improving all the time.
I much prefer the immutable approach (rpm-ostree) or even an unsophisticated approach like a Dockerfile, which is worse but much closer to the status quo, than to create a perfect world from scratch and hope that everybody follows the Light. Software is too large, complex, hacky, buggy and nuanced to expect it to fit into neat preordained categories. Because unless you do very simple things, you'll soon find yourself out of the happy path and have to resort to doing the hacky way anyway.
This is what some believe killed Lisp machines vs UNIX. I guess, like Lisp, in decades there will a vocal contingent of people lamenting the fact that we all run immutable Microsoft Kubernetes Ubuntu (MSKU) instead of using the more refined NixOS approach.
https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html