right here

I’m using NixOS, and I have a few tips:

1. Use flakes
2. If it ain’t working, steam-run it.

It’s a lot of work tbh. I’ve used arch for 10+ years and recently switched to NixOs to give it a spin, and couldn’t get my exact setup that I wanted for tools and accessories I use, and the system immutability isn’t that practical imo. So I switched back to my old Arch setup and now just use Flakes for various projects I have, basically just the Nix part, which is very nice imo.

Been daily for a while now, came over from Garuda, and a few other Arch derivative before that. NixOS is 99.9% fantastic. Lenovo carbon X1 Gen 6. Runs great. Newer custom build higher end desktop with AMD 7900RX GPU. Also runs great. I have a feeling it’ll run great on pretty much anything.

The package store is amazing. The package store absolutely dwarfs the AUR. That being said, it seems a lot of the store packages are support / dependency packages that you wouldn’t install standalone.
I always had a concern in the back of my mind with the AUR. Is the package trusted by multiple people?
I’ve not had to rollback much, but it’s SUPER simple, and takes seconds for the most part. A reboot at the most.

Things I wish I knew: I run declarative for everything, rather than imperative. Therefore, small changes are a tiny bit more of a hassle. Example: changing the hosts file. Rather than a quick hosts file edit and done, it’s a quick edit of the system configuration file, then a nixos-rebuild switch. Nearly any change is like this. (I’ve not moved to flakes yet.)

if you have any shell scripts, and they’re hard-coded to the env: #!/bin/bash, #!/usr/bin/zsh, etc… you’ll need to port those over to #!/usr/bin/env

appimages are well supported, but I ran into an issue where a custom appimage that someone else wrote won’t authenticate correctly because the browser isn’t included in the environment. I could t-shoot it more, but just too damn lazy to care.

The local storage location for apps can get huge rather quickly, as each iteration/change is stored for rollback purposes. Make sure to setup a garbage collection schedule with whatever your comfortable with.

Would i recommend? Depends on your patience and prior experience. NixOs is VERY VERY different than arch or pretty much any other distro, even other immutable ones. It takes a bit to get your head wrapped around it.

I saw someone say start with Nix (the package manager) on your current distro, learn the ropes, add in pieces like Flakes and Home Manager as you learn. Learn the Nix language. And then move to NixOS. Probably good advice.

I ignored all of that. Jumped in head first. Lots of frustration in the beginning. But now… I won’t be going back to a standard linux distro.

Immutability makes me warm and fuzzy. Being absolutely sure that I can easily recover from a boneheaded mistake. Beautiful. Hard drive shits the bed? Drop in a new one, apply my configs, and I’m right back where I was within 30 minutes, complete with all data, apps installed and configured? Priceless.

Using it on a somewhat old Microsoft surface laptop, and it’s been really great. I really like nix for packages, but nixos got very, very cool when I was able to switch DE by changing two lines in the configuration file and everything just worked. It’s very hard to break too, which is useful for me…

I prefer Debian.

I really like it. The language took me time to learn but so far it has been worth it. The ability to rollback in git and rebuild has saved my computer countless times; usually from my own mistakes.

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I’ve been running NixOS for the past four years in all my computers. It’s really, really the end game of Linux distributions for me. But it’s not for everybody. The Nix language can be a tough thing to learn, if you’re not a programmer and haven’t done anything with lazy functional languages before. It’s a dynamic language, with not super great documentation for practical things and missing a good language server that would let you to jump to definitions when learning how nixpkgs work and how to build things.

Also, what I think is a serious problem, is how flakes are not yet enabled in the default installation. So first you learn with the basic template, and some helpful person comes talking about how great flakes are, and in a few weeks you might have written your own system flake finally and got it working. Flakes are really important to understand as soon as possible, because with them you get the lock file that gives you real reproducibility between computers and full control on which version of packages you get.

But, when you learn all that, and get your company to go full-on with nix, having flakes in all projects, it’s the best programmer’s operating system out there. Here’s my config to steal stuff.

Using NixOS as my daily OS on a X1 since six years now.

The first months have been hard as at this time was no installer at all and I had to do everything manually. After a while I got used to the update process.

Recently I switched to Nix Flakes which is another challenge but seems to make the Nix way even more consequent.

The only odd thing what drives me nerves is that compiling on that machine takes sometimes a half day.

Besides this it is still the best OS I ever used

I had as a daily driver for a few weeks through VirtualBox. Next week I plan on installing it as a secondary OS to see if it plays well with my hardware and if so, I’ll make it my only OS.

Yes. Absolutely.

For me it shines in the replicability. For example recently (at the time of writing this) I have gone to a different place without the ability to take my pc with me (its not a laptop duh). I prepared my config and pushed it to the git repo. With me I only brought a usb drive with all my ssh keys and another one with the headless NixOS installation environment. I set it up, had to do some UEFI smashing and hardware adjusting but that’s just hardware specific. In like 30 minutes I had my full setup, my hyprland, my doom emacs, and most of that time it was downloading packages.(not to say cache.nixos.org is slow but the internet there was dogsh…)

Would I recommend? If you are ready to do some table smashing and if you are experienced enough with Linux and the nitty gritty of it, then HECK YEAH. You have to know that NixOS is not for beginners. It is a bulletproof distro for ultra power users that, if you use correctly could lead to a impenetrably stable system, which you could reproduce on ANY other machine. And also rollbacks are awesome.

Conclusion? NixOS is awesome!

as long as the existing packages are enough*, it’s really good. if you need to start packaging stuff yourself this is when you’ll usually start hitting the pain points (of both Nix the language and the documentation)

*: nixpkgs does have a huge number of packages but that count is massively over-inflated by essentially being a meta-repo that also contains all the language-specific dependencies of it’s packages (think pip or npm) and mostly-auto-generated vim plugin packages and whatnot. for things you’d actually want to install “manually” the breadth of the AUR still trumps it in my experience

I’ve been using NixOS for over a year and I can’t imagine using anything else. I originally started using it because I liked the idea of version controlling the entire configuration, but now I use it for everything.

The most underrated feature of Nix is being able to instantly roll back an update that breaks something that you don’t want to deal with. An update breaks kitty or neovim? If I have something to do I can just roll back and fix it later. Awesome.

It’s not for everyone. I can’t imagine someone who isn’t at least a hobbyist programmer having the desire to overcome the technical nature of it.

Heres my config.

NixOS is absolutely worth the effort. You have to frontload a bit of effort setting up configs, but you get a whole lot of incredibly valuable stuff in return, and a lot of things become easier in the long run.