From Frustration to Power: What We Learned at Nixcademy
We recently completed two days of Nixcademy training. Due to time constraints, we had to skip a few topics, but since we’ve been using Nix and NixOS for around five years, we felt comfortable doing so.
Let’s start with some fun facts. I knew that nixpkgs boasts the largest collection of packages among repositories, but I didn’t fully grasp just how huge the gap actually is. You can see a clear comparison here. Additionally, nixpkgs is among the top 10 GitHub projects by contributions, standing right alongside heavyweights like Microsoft VSCode, TypeScript, and TensorFlow. I can only imagine the confusion at the Gituniverse conference when attendees saw this list, since many hadn’t even heard of Nix or NixOS. But awareness is changing quickly. Looking at the project’s star history, growth has clearly become exponential.
Of course, while there are many fantastic things about Nix and NixOS, there must be some downsides, right? The most significant challenge is undoubtedly complexity. The Nix ecosystem itself is intricate, and as you delve deeper, it only becomes more complicated. You can achieve incredibly powerful things that other systems simply can’t do—but these tasks are rarely trivial (I’m looking at you, fixed-point recursion).
