What is Nix and why you should try it
My experience with Nix was a real pleasure, and a complete failure.<p>I set out with the goal of building a development environment for a software I was working on. I thought - Nix sounds like a better Docker, where it's possible to choose package versions independently of the rest of the system. It's perfect for testing!<p>I found the package description language refreshing - it was powerful without getting <i>too</i> complicated. Over the course of a couple of days I was able to adapt a few packages and create my own too, with the build environment.<p>It was almost finished, but the last problem remained: installing CUDA and the userspace portion of the Nvidia driver. It's not rocket science – I thought – all I need is a few .so's, it even works with Docker.<p>Alas, after battling Nix for another couple of days, trying to use generic GL, installing the Nvidia one, ignoring it altogether or trying to using the host version - I gave up. I found no way to build a package linked against OpenGL that would actually work.<p>Despite that, I hope to use Nix with a different project in the future.