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?
Data wise, it’s mostly the same. i use syncthing to a couple different systems, one of which is essentially a storage server. The main difference for me is the app installations. apt install all the apps, then configure each. Kills a whole day for me. I’m sure it can be automated, maybe ansible / salt / . But the way I use it, Nix enforces that I always update my configs in a manner that is easily restorable.
Copy my backed up system into /etc/nixos/
Run nixos-rebuild boot. Reboot.
Setup syncthing. ? Profit
Instead of doing nixos-rebuid boot and rebooting, you can just do a nixos-rebuild switch and not reboot.
Of course, depending on what you’re doing it mifht be a good idea to reboot, but if you’re just adding a package to your config file, it doesn’t matter.
Yeah, for the restore process, I install a couple drivers for some USB devices. So a reboot is required. Otherwise, I has an alias for switch.