Introduce your stance
I have been fascinated by the technical ingenuity of Nix/NixOS over the years and also how unconvincing its advertisement material frequently is.
Describe the issue
There's enough confusion with website nixos.org being a website mostly about Nix and not about NixOS. Currently the only location I found with basic information about NixOS is https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/ under paragraph called "How NixOS works?" that starts with a line:
"NixOS is based on Nix, a purely functional package management system."
That's great, but you can't introduce a new term by saying what it's based on. You define it first, for example:
"NixOS is an operating system based on Linux that is built around Nix, a purely functional package management system."
Then the article keeps going on about how it works without ever bothering to answer any basic questions a user might have. Here's some really basic things that a new user might find interesting, before giving them elaborate details of how NixOS works on technical level:
"Even though NixOS is technically a linux distribution, its underlying architecture is unlike any other: the filesystem itself is organized in a way that allows easy dependency resolution, package upgrades, administration and rollbacks. NixOS is designed primarily for system administrators, but it also perfectly suits power users and enthusiasts. It boasts a huge repository of binary prebuilt packages (in fact, it has the largest repository among all other linux distributions) and if you request a package that has not been cached in our package store yet, nix will seamlessly compile it from source on your machine. The way it works is..."
I really feel there's these extremely basic questions that every single Ubuntu user will ask when looking at NixOS that nobody bothers to answer. NixOS users are completely lost in its deep ingenuity and forget its very basic user-facing properties, like "NixOS is a linux-based operating system" -- a simple fact that's not even stated anywhere (?) on its home page.
Introduce your stance I have been fascinated by the technical ingenuity of Nix/NixOS over the years and also how unconvincing its advertisement material frequently is.
Describe the issue There's enough confusion with website nixos.org being a website mostly about Nix and not about NixOS. Currently the only location I found with basic information about NixOS is https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/ under paragraph called "How NixOS works?" that starts with a line: "NixOS is based on Nix, a purely functional package management system." That's great, but you can't introduce a new term by saying what it's based on. You define it first, for example:
"NixOS is an operating system based on Linux that is built around Nix, a purely functional package management system."
Then the article keeps going on about how it works without ever bothering to answer any basic questions a user might have. Here's some really basic things that a new user might find interesting, before giving them elaborate details of how NixOS works on technical level: "Even though NixOS is technically a linux distribution, its underlying architecture is unlike any other: the filesystem itself is organized in a way that allows easy dependency resolution, package upgrades, administration and rollbacks. NixOS is designed primarily for system administrators, but it also perfectly suits power users and enthusiasts. It boasts a huge repository of binary prebuilt packages (in fact, it has the largest repository among all other linux distributions) and if you request a package that has not been cached in our package store yet, nix will seamlessly compile it from source on your machine. The way it works is..."
I really feel there's these extremely basic questions that every single Ubuntu user will ask when looking at NixOS that nobody bothers to answer. NixOS users are completely lost in its deep ingenuity and forget its very basic user-facing properties, like "NixOS is a linux-based operating system" -- a simple fact that's not even stated anywhere (?) on its home page.
Page links This is my feedback to https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/