Why I Left NixOS for Ubuntu

Programming@programming.dev – 59 points – 2 months ago

Hey all, thought this might be of interest to some here.

Wrote about why I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu after using it for several months on my daily driver. Suspect that this take is likely to be kind of controversial and court claims of skill issues, which might even be true.

Let me know what you think.

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I didn't realize pip and venv didn't work... that's a pretty big deal breaker for a lot of people, myself included.

I'm not a Nix user, but doesn't Nix make both pip and venv obsolete in a way? Nix is a package manager (which could be used to package anything including Python packages/modules) and also allows you to create environments that include only certain packages of certain versions.

Sounds good in theory, until you want to install scikit-image or other Python libraries which need complex builds.

python3Packages.scikit-image appears to be available and non-broken in nixpkgs; on my machine, I get /nix/store/w8681ncsw92cn4gq6gyraw4z19r0r6c3-python3.11-scikit-image-0.21.0. Do you have an actual example?

I understand your point, but given nixpkgs' position in the community, it might be a moot point.

pip and venv are working, but packages that require compiling or ship binaries by itself usually won't work out of the box. They depend on gcc or libopenssl to be globally available: the whole gist of Nix not doing 😅

I've found devenv.sh to be most convenient way to handle such projects. You can define the dependencies for a project. It has explicit python/venv/requirements.txt/poetry support. It works for NixOS, but also other distros and MacOS. Very convenient to share and lock development tools and libraries across a team.