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long, NixOS accessibility/usability 

@risottobias@tech.lgbt I would say that there is a significant part of the community who feels that it should be more accessible, and there are ongoing efforts to actually make it so (in documentation, ergonomics, etc.).

At the same time, there are definitely also people who feel that "it's fine, you just have to learn how to use it". This can make it exhausting to have discussions about how to improve accessibility, when those people get involved.

With how most of the ecosystem is de facto managed by the community (because the Nix runtime itself only has a very limited scope), I would say that there is a high chance that things will become more accessible over time - but exactly how long that takes will very much depends on how many people have the energy and motivation to actually make it happen.

One thing that *does* seem to be fairly universal, is people's desire to have Nix be a sort of 'universal fabric' for system and package management scenarios, ie. the idea is that it or a model like it *should* be adopted (behind the scenes) everywhere. Most of the disagreement is about whether that is already viable today or not.

And from my own perspective as someone trying to work on accessibility: I'd say that, on balance, the community is receptive to this sort of work. There's just a lot left to do, but it's not a hopeless endeavour IMO.

All that having been said: much like with Mastodon, there are *some* things that just work fundamentally differently, and to which people will have to adjust. But I'm convinced that it's *possible* to make these accessible enough that it exceeds the usability of most other Linux distros today.

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re: long, NixOS accessibility/usability 

@risottobias@tech.lgbt Actually, as some concrete examples of how Nix functionality could serve to make things *more* usable than other distros, if done right:
- The generation/revision system makes it possible to build an intuitive *and reliable* system rollback UI
- The isolated environments makes it possible for a (graphical) package manager to have a "try out this app without installing it" button
- The isolation also makes it very unlikely for different software sources to conflict; this means that the whole problem of "I added an external repo and now my system is broken" can be entirely sidestepped, and in fact this can be actively *encouraged* in the UI design

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