So there's an interesting problem that Nix has, which is the "curse of knowledge"... once you learn how it works, suddenly everything else in the space starts looking super fragile. I joke about this a lot, but it's a very real thing.

And that has implications for how Nix(OS) folks interact with other communities - they'll often point out, for example, that some problem isn't actually fundamental or inherent because Nix *did* solve it already a decade ago.

And outwardly this looks a lot like "a fanboy pushing their favourite tool on everybody", but it isn't, really - quite often, it's *genuinely* a case of that person seeing issues that most other people have learned to ignore or accept, and not being able to un-see that.

And they are getting *legitimately* frustrated by other people continuing to build more towers of complexity on top of (to them) obviously fragile systems - not because their favourite tool isn't being used, but because of all the wasted effort and time that other people put into needlessly broken systems, that could've been put to so much better use.

I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this toot, but this is something I rarely see being talked about. It's not exclusive to NixOS, either; there's a very similar thing going on with capability-based security, and undoubtedly a number of other topics that I don't know about.

It feels like there should be some sort of broader conversation about this?