this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Am I out of touch?

No, it's the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

I’d actually argue the opposite in regards to clutter. If I switch to a new config without the software I don’t want anymore, that software goes away entirely when I do a garbage collect and there’s nothing left over like there might be in ‘’~/.config’’ on a non-immutable system.

IMO, the actual realization of Dolstra’s dream is flakes and home manager. They allow you to boil your whole config down to a git repo where you can track changes and rollback the lock file if needed.

I find it nice to open my config in an IDE and search by string inside of my config where I can comment out whatever I don’t need. Laziness also makes that pretty convenient too. Nix will only attempt to interpret what is accessible in code. If I comment out an import, that whole part of the config seamlessly shuts off. It’s quite elegant.

I’m even more envious of the atomicity of GUIX but IMO, it’s a little too much building the world from scratch for a newb like me.