In this recent post discussing efforts which have been made to improve documentation, the author reckons that one of the reasons Nixpkgs is difficult to understand is that Nix's powerful expressiveness allowed different people to take different approaches to solve similar problems. (As opposed to, having to rely on a common solution).
IMO.. difficulties with Nix fall into three broad categories: with Nix's idiosyncrasies, with the Nixpkgs codebase, or with the software you're trying to get Nix to run.
On most OSs, you might not need to have a deep understanding of what's going on in order to fix a problem. With Nix (& NixOS), running into problems probably requires a decent grasp of what you're doing, as well as what Nix is doing, and maybe how the Nixpkgs code is doing it.
> the use of a GUI tool to help
I think between "easy/hard to understand" and "easy/hard to model with a GUI", GUI helps a lot with things that are easy, but not so much with things that are difficult.
e.g. with VSCode, you can get a GUI to help you set options. Emacs also has a GUI to help you customize options; but you don't get a GUI that helps you write elisp.
Learning how to write Nix in order to get it to do what you want can be tough, yeah.
https://www.tweag.io/blog/2024-05-02-right-words-right-place...
In this recent post discussing efforts which have been made to improve documentation, the author reckons that one of the reasons Nixpkgs is difficult to understand is that Nix's powerful expressiveness allowed different people to take different approaches to solve similar problems. (As opposed to, having to rely on a common solution).
IMO.. difficulties with Nix fall into three broad categories: with Nix's idiosyncrasies, with the Nixpkgs codebase, or with the software you're trying to get Nix to run.
On most OSs, you might not need to have a deep understanding of what's going on in order to fix a problem. With Nix (& NixOS), running into problems probably requires a decent grasp of what you're doing, as well as what Nix is doing, and maybe how the Nixpkgs code is doing it.
> the use of a GUI tool to help
I think between "easy/hard to understand" and "easy/hard to model with a GUI", GUI helps a lot with things that are easy, but not so much with things that are difficult.
e.g. with VSCode, you can get a GUI to help you set options. Emacs also has a GUI to help you customize options; but you don't get a GUI that helps you write elisp.
e.g. I'm not sure that efforts like https://github.com/snowfallorg/nixos-conf-editor (formerly "snowflake") provide much more help than what the "search nixos options" provides https://search.nixos.org/options
I think most of the time people run into difficulty, a GUI isn't going to help. (In the same way that people don't ask for a GUI for Terraform).