42 engineers on Hacker News describe using Nix first-hand: 24 endorse it, 2 regret it, 10 are mixed.
“I build workflows... nix defined workflows that run in highly isolated, fully composed environments.”
endorse · personal · poelzi · 2026-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“modeling everything as workflows of composeable nix flakes... It is not only so much more efficient, reduces errors, increases quality”
endorse · personal · poelzi · 2026-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I find Nix more approachable with the help of LLMs and then Nix has become one of the ways I manage the environments”
endorse · personal · ectoloph · 2026-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using Nix for years now, and still haven't set up any of our own binary cache.”
endorse · production · pxc · 2025-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“3 years of using it for dev environments and packaging at work”
mixed · production · 3 yr · mplanchard · 2025-04-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using nixpkgs on macos (and without brew) for 3 years now”
endorse · personal · 3 yr · Quiark · 2024-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my experience Nix is a force multiplier.”
endorse · production · microtonal · 2024-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my experience, Nix is very high leverage. My company has ~5 nix gurus, but Nix is invisibly used by hundreds of engineers.”
endorse · production · hamandcheese · 2024-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Nix to distribute open-source application security tools to user endpoints and CI/CD environments at work.”
endorse · production · pxc · 2024-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use nix at work. I'm not a huge fan - I find it too opinionated. Appreciate it for what it is, though, and understand its fans.”
mixed · production · otter-in-a-suit · 2024-09-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched our dev environment from Docker Compose to Nix on those same MacBooks and CPU usage when from 300% to <10% overnight.”
endorse · production · JasonSage · 2024-08-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it relies on the Nix package manager instead of the RPM one... I've used it in-prod and have nothing but good things to say about it.”
endorse · production · talldayo · 2024-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“nix develop —impure, which is easier than most intermediate git stuff... I made the mistake of trying to use Nix to manage Python once, never again”
mixed · personal · benreesman · 2024-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to using Nix at our startup because the rebuild time, reproducibility, and performance of Docker”
endorse · production · jljljl · 2024-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can pin and patch any combination of dependencies, even conflicting ones in single environment, with reproducible builds”
endorse · personal · smilliken · 2023-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having used nix-built OCI images in prod... Not having anything but the application sounds good, but it has the very significant disadvantage”
mixed · production · yjftsjthsd-h · 2023-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only thing I regret about nix is that I didn't find it sooner.”
endorse · personal · nurple · 2023-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Nix is hard to get right, but when you get it right, it stays that way.”
mixed · personal · ingenieroariel · 2022-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Also being able to roll back is invaluable.”
endorse · personal · 0.1 yr · sunsunsunsun · 2022-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when we actually attempt to do something in Nix, we run into countless bugs and problems, including inaccurate documentation.”
regret · production · blueflow · 2022-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If something is in nixpkgs though you can be pretty certain that it will work at your colleagues machine just like it does on yours”
endorse · production · fesc · 2022-02-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Nix is used for its wide array of prebuilt third-party packages.”
endorse · production · jvolkman · 2021-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For me, being able to derive the CI servers, AWS deployments, build servers... from a single source of truth, actually does sell Nix pretty nicely.”
endorse · production · svenhy · 2021-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I dove head first into Nix and after a understanding the language, the OS and package manager was actually not that hard to understand. ... I don't regret any of the time”
endorse · personal · diggan · 2021-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“While I did have to first work a forward incompatibility issue in Nix itself, the rest of the upgrade was a single step”
mixed · personal · pxc · 2021-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've tried the nix.dev installation + nix-darwin instructions 4 or 5 times but never make it very far.”
regret · personal · n8henrie · 2021-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched our CI server to building almost all the binaries using Nix. ... Now... I can run a single nix-build command to build our game”
endorse · production · quyse · 2021-04-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“since the advent of Nix and now Terraform, repeatability hasn't been a problem.”
endorse · production · akiselev · 2020-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using Nix for deploying a Rails app for an enterprise customer for quite a few years now.”
mixed · production · mzaccari · 2020-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using Nix for about 2 years now at our company and its pretty amazing.”
endorse · production · 2 yr · blogle · 2018-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in Nix you can just run a bash script which stores the build products in a path given as `$out`”
endorse · personal · chriswarbo · 2018-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Deployment and reproducible builds were so bad for us that we switched to Nix. It largely solved the problem, but it has us doing a lot of work”
mixed · production · throwaway894345 · 2017-10-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It helps us give all developers and CI an identical environment.”
endorse · production · austinl · 2017-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My current laptop uses Nix, which is a source-based distribution with a binary caching system. I love Nix, but it's a small enough community”
mixed · personal · aidenn0 · 2017-01-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“including writing a nixpkg for Nignx configuration and my application, all in about a day.”
endorse · production · jallmann · 2016-08-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Been using nix for a while for bookkeeping my development environments and it's been nice. The config syntax just is a bit unfamiliar”
mixed · personal · arianvanp · 2014-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Nix instead of OpenTofu for managing providers”
neutral · production · pxc · 2025-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“nix is very verbose about what it hates in your config.”
neutral · personal · exe34 · 2025-07-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“while nix is still very new to me!”
neutral · personal · lolinder · 2024-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they're still less convenient for me than flakes because they don't have great integration with Nix's profile managers (nix-env, nixos-rebuild, home-manager).”
neutral · personal · pxc · 2022-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It uses Nix because postgresql has C extensions, which can depend on anything in the software universe.”
neutral · production · 2 yr · smilliken · 2022-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?