| 12 Jul 2025 |
|  Anna F joined the room. | 13:56:03 |
| Anna F | Hi! This seems like a really lovely community. I was just wondering if this is a place to ask general questions about Lix as someone who's considering using it?
| 14:17:55 |
 FireFly | I think so! I think that's the main topic, although sometimes the channel veers into adjacent ones | 14:25:12 |
| Anna F | Okay great, so like what are the concrete advantages to Lix over Nix? Also, how compatible is it with Nix projects? I know its generally the same but are there things that don't work?
| 14:56:59 |
 K900 | Generally the only things that don't work are
extremely new cppnix features things that were already unsound things that abuse the interpreter in ways that should be unsound
| 14:57:55 |
| K900 | The concrete advantages right now are:
faster eval (often, but not by a lot) better error reporting in a bunch of places cleaner code base
| 14:58:43 |
| FireFly | in practice wrt compatibility, I haven't really noticed issues | 14:59:29 |
| FireFly | admittedly I'm probably quite "boring" in terms of the bits I use though | 14:59:49 |
| K900 | I would also say that I trust the Lix team much more than the Nix team in terms of doing things right | 14:59:49 |
 aloisw | Compatibility is generally quite good since nixpkgs requires compatibility with older versions of nix that prevent usage of newer features that might be incompatible with Lix. | 15:00:31 |
| K900 | Yes, for Nixpkgs Lix is drop-in compatible | 15:01:29 |
| K900 | Out of tree things are YMMV | 15:01:34 |
| K900 | But there's some ongoing work on tooling to test those too | 15:01:52 |
| Anna F | Okay, awesome, thats good to know. ig a follow up question is, aside from being community instead of corporate focuses, how does it compare to determinate nix?
| 15:02:27 |
| K900 | In practice most of the value add of Determinate Nix is focused on enterprise Mac users | 15:02:50 |
| K900 | They ship some very experimental things that are supposed to make it faster but have known correctness issues | 15:03:18 |
| K900 | And I think they're still roughly as slow as Lix? | 15:03:44 |
| aloisw | Compared to determinate nix on a technical basis specifically, more focused on stability and less on putting in random experimental stuff. | 15:03:48 |
| Anna F | Okay, that makes sense, tysm!
| 15:04:42 |
| Anna F | I'm currently starting the process of rebuilding my rather messy nix config from scratch, and I think I'm gonna take the opportunity to switch over to Lix
| 15:05:24 |
| aloisw | If you plan on re-doing your configuration, it might still be a good idea to switch to Lix before to prevent new-nix-isms from creeping into it, particularly if you want to use flakes. | 15:10:36 |
| Anna F | Yeah thats kinda my plan. I'm currently using endeavourOS as sort of a temporary system building my config in a vm
| 15:18:00 |
| Anna F | I do want to use flakes, out of curiosity what are some common nix-isms to avoid?
| 15:18:14 |
 crop | In reply to @annabellaf:matrix.org
I do want to use flakes, out of curiosity what are some common nix-isms to avoid?
Maybe look at the blog post by jade on flakes. And if you don't want to use flakes she also made other recent posts. | 15:40:04 |
| crop | https://jade.fyi/blog/flakes-arent-real/ | 15:40:51 |
| crop | If you don't want to use flakes read this maybe: https://jade.fyi/blog/pinning-nixos-with-npins/ | 15:42:20 |
| crop | Oh i have a left, right and a do, don't weakness. 😂 | 15:44:04 |
| Anna F | tysm!
| 16:03:15 |
| aloisw | In reply to @annabellaf:matrix.org
I do want to use flakes, out of curiosity what are some common nix-isms to avoid?
I don't actually know, allegedly there are some, but I was thinking in more general terms. Like if you try random things out and they happen to work on newer mainline Nix it is not guaranteed that they work on Lix. | 16:11:11 |
| aloisw | Possibly some of the Git LFS and submodules in flakes stuff. | 16:12:04 |
