my wife has endured so much waffle about how great nixos is
i feel bad for her
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I've used various flavors of Arch for years. I tried Nix and spent several hours failing to do anything - like table-stakes shit like installing packages.
I went back to Arch.
The way out is through
Did you try Nix (on Arch) or NixOS? For the latter, https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-declarative-package-mgmt explains the basic installation.
I clicked on the first link to the options appendix and noped right the fuck out.
That's a level of involvement I reserve for activities where I either get paid 100β¬+/h, or otherwise support my family.
And from what I hear, the main selling point of NixOS is how easy it is to reinstall.
Which I don't do more than once every couple of years.
And then I click "next" a bunch of times on Debian, and copy /home over from my backup.
And from what I hear, the main selling point of NixOS is how easy it is to reinstall.
Well, that isn't the first thing I'd mention, but whatever. Use whatever you're comfortable with.
that isn't the first thing I'd mention
...well, what is? The logo looks nice.
For me, the factors were:
- the ability to split your system configuration into logical modules. Describe one logical thing in one file, no matter how many other factors are involved. Don't want that thing anymore? Just don't reference the module, and all changes will be reverted.
- easily try out new configurations and roll back, regardless of underlying filesystem, without performance penalties.
- the ability to put logic into your configuration (technically, there's no difference between what's typically referred to as configuration and a module in nix, though the latter usually has more "logic" and provides values with lower priority).
- as a consequence, make modules transferable between systems. There's e.g. a Lanzaboote module that enables Secure Boot in a really smart way on NixOS, and the configuration is in my opinion easier than on any other Linux system.
- the reproducibility, from which the "easy reinstallation" follows
The ease of reinstalling is not the main selling point. That's just one of the (imho many) benefits of having a declarative reproducible configuration.
Many people balk at the nix language, which i think isn't that hard to learn, But having to learn just one language/syntax instead of knowing each different application's config syntax is a huge plus for me. Plus you basically get a preprocessor for all configs, which certainly is nice.
Now if you're not a software developer i can see why that would still be a roadblock. But honestly for a pretty straight forward setup, most of it you can just find on the wiki or other places.
I want to like Nix. The idea of declarative managing is super appealing. But I just don't have the time. My dream is to leverage both worlds, a cloud native Nix based OS. Every time I sit down to plan that task it looks daunting though.
I feel this, but my other love is gentoo...if only I could get portage to just stop finding more package masks or multiple instances of the same package slot..it's always something that makes me do another upgrade in an attempt to troubleshoot and it's usually because I get so caught up in just fixing silly mistakes that I forget to actually get to the eselect news that would have avoided the last stack of 6 compounding issues in the first place.
But I love how fun it is and I'm never leaving no matter what other nix-like cults pop up
Between that and never having the money to upgrade my computer I finally had to give up Gentoo after nearly 20 years of use. I keep wanting to go back but its just too painful and I just can't bite the bullet to do a binary install.
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