Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
After a day and a half of usage it became painfully obvious to me that nix is unusable. There are at least four competing ways to use the nix language to configure software. Each of them individually tickles my sense of very neat engineering but together they are a nightmare, with unique shims that must be used between every combination.<p>Much worse, nix does not do any actual package <i>management</i>, i.e., dependency management. There is no way to derive a common-denominator configuration for a dependency shared between two dependent packages, each with their own configuration requirements (a la portage). Nix style is to install the dependency twice. It achieves that wonderfully, which is essential for development environments, but it should permit the shared dependency model for the &quot;base system&quot;.