I’m currently running Arch and it’s great, but I’m noticing I’m not staying on the ball in regards to updates. I’ve been reading a bit about Nix and NixOS and thinking of trying it as my daily driver. I’ve got a Lenovo x1 xtreme laptop, I don’t do much gaming (except OSRS), use firefox, jetbrains stuff, bitwarden, remmina, obsidian, and docker.
Is anyone running NixOS as their daily? How are you liking it and are there any pitfalls / stuff you wish you knew before?
You can combine stable and unstable packages since they can have different dependencies
Given this you can have the base system be running the unstable versions, while holding back things like wine from upgrading
I’ve been using Guix system for a couple years and am really liking it. I got a new computer and put popos on it for the seamless Nvidia drivers, but I still have guix package manager and Guix system on other computers.
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 recently played with the AUR on Debian using Distrobox, could that be used on NixOS too?
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When I experimented around with NixOS, I never got a chance to play around with Distrobox specifically - however I did use Podman with no issue, which is what Distrobox uses behind the scenes so I suspect it should work.
There’s also a Distrobox package in Nixpkgs which further affirms my belief in that.
Is it, though?
https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique
Nonunique means other package managers have it, so it excludes those you said that inflate the user count
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.
I love NixOS. I run it on my home server. However, I can’t daily drive it. I need something a little less rigid to do my day to day work. Although it is greatly satisfying to have everything reproducible, it isn’t always practical to dedicate the time to making it so.
Do you use NixOS as a docker host? I’m hoping to move from an alpine VM to. NixOS VM for my docker host (hosted on proxmox). Would appreciate a config if you don’t mind posting yours. Also pitfalls for server use?
Sorry I haven’t really messed with docker on my server. I run multimedia servers and that’s about it.
Daily use for several years. Nix the package manager has been the bigger impact for me as I use multiple systems, and they’re not all running NixOS, but my nix configs work across them all. As for NixOS, I would not necessarily recommend it for a non-programmer, but if you’ve ever found yourself thinking about how operating systems are assembled from parts, then NixOS could be a very good fit for you.
I have used it as a daily driver. My biggest issue was the nix language. If I was to go back, I would invest more time in learning nix.
Personally I still don’t have a great idea of how the language works, kinda just took the template and extended it following the same pattern, if it gave me a syntax error trying to do something funky I fix it and learn through trial and error
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.
right here
I wanted to install it on my Pinebook Pro (AARCH64, with Tow-Boot installed to SPI) but I haven’t gotten it working.
Regular nixos user here. Also failed on pinebook nixos, then bricked it trying to install something else. Ah well, seemed like it would be a cool machine.
SPI flash bricked the machine? That should be a fairly easy repair for your local electronics shop, if you tell them what file to flash there
Its been a while since I did it. I needed towboot but you couldn’t install that with the default distro, then I tried installing another distro and now it doesn’t even show an LED when I plug it in. Is it flash, is it something else? Dunno. Just hasn’t been enough of a priority for me to spend more time on it.
I have been a very happy NixOS user for 2 1/2 years now! (https://github.com/axelf4/nixos-config)
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The biggest barrier for me is the language. It makes no sense to me and I’m a Haskell (as well as others) coder. Also the documentation is non-existent.
Just delete the right ) and it will work. It got caught in the link
The right parenthesis got caught in the link
I’m using it currently. Documentation is really annoying to deal with because it’s changing so quickly. I went with a flake + home manager setup and tried to keep my config as spartan as possible. Most of the configurations I found online use a ton of files an a deep tree of folders and I found that really hard to follow. You can look at my configuration here.
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.
I was just going through the README and I’m definitely stealing the idea chowning the /etc/nixos dir and symlinking it to $HOME/.config/nixpkgs. How did I not think of this myself?
Thanks for the config! I’m a developer and that also contributes to my interest - being able to express my configuration like that. Your config is a bit overwhelming, but in a good way, I’ve created a git repo for myself to start off and using yours as a reference since you seem to do a lot of cool shit. Am going to start off with flakes.
Not sure if I’m going to jump in with both feet yet (since apart from my work laptop and servers, this is my only machine) but I am going to journey into writing a conifguration properly and testing it on a VM. Already using nix packages on my Arch install.
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I’ve been daily driving it for six months now. I wish I would’ve know the Nix language well enough before jumping in to attempt declarative configurations. Not that it’s hard.
I have had issues that have had me temporarily try Pop or Debian, but dependency hell is real and the Nix community is wonderful. I have been able to solve every single one of my handful of problems in less than a day or two (sometimes in minutes) with the community.
Edit: oh yeah, and documentation is not great… Again, the community has been my source of answers to many questions.
As many others have said, it’s hard to imagine life without NixOS once you get the hang of it.
