this comment reads suspiciously like it was written by an LLM (eg ChatGPT). was it? please don’t do that!

Do you use Nix, personally? Also, it’s crazy that I found this post while thinking about distro hopping.

Indeed, why would I switch, already have been running NixOS for 10+ years.

I’ll edit. That was clearly a stretch

Note that there’s both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.

The configuration stuff seems great. I guess it reduce the struggle of porting a full config from one pc to another right ?

Important to note that NixOS has both a rolling release and point release version.

Are you still using it and happy with it? I’ve been increasingly using single purpose dev VMs in a server, and a declarative configuration system would make the process of spinning them up faster and more robust. My current shell script system is clunky, and I’ve been looking at Ansible.

Wow, that sounds really cool (specially the config thing). I’ll have to try it sometime.

It’s kind of funny because I’d put NixOS on a complete newbies computer for sure, and recommend it to an expert… But I’m less sure if I’d tell a random mid-intermediate Linux user to switch.

Like if Grandma wants Linux on their computer to do some internet browsing for some reason… I’d absolutely put NixOS on it because it’s easy to manage the system for them… But somebody who is a little familiar with Linux already might be more confused about the differences. It’s kind of the ultimate beginner distro and the ultimate power-user distro, but a bit awkward between those extremes, haha.

It’s true that it can be a powerful distro but I’ve also heard from some users that the advanced-level documentation is lacking and only limited to forums and source code. I think maybe if the documentation was more thorough I would try nixos.

you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software

So, pretty much like any other distro

This very much. I used to have lots of unchecked config and state files everywhere on Arch. Now everything is checked in and wiped on boot so if something breaks after a reboot i know what broke.

Like how the opengl rendering did due to nixpkgs version differences

You forgot to mention: cross-compiling binaries for other architectures has never been so easy. You can even make them static builds.

It’s breathed new life into my old synology NAS which is stuck on an old Linux 3 kernel.

I use Arch NixOS BTW.

Do you run the gnu guix distro or just use the package manager? Because iirc it uses only free software, even for drivers. So I imagine it is not that easy to find compatible hardware.

yeah, Guix is great. I tried to use NixOS for a while but I couldn’t get over how much I dislike Nix as a language. Scheme is way way better imo. Guix definitely isn’t as polished Nix given its lower number of users but it’s still a very pleasant experience.

Are packages updated as often as Arch-based distributions? In GNU Guix, MATE Is at least there years old.

Oh boy my two cents time!

I love the concept of NixOS. A fully declarative , reproduceable system from a single config repo! Sounds theoretically like it would be my kind of thing.

Sure, theoretically, I could have a fully reproduceable system. The time spent declaring that fully reproduceable system though… I remember the first time I was trying to get my usual disk setup of, a luks encrypted btrfs partition with multi-factor enabled decryption/authentication.

On a normal install it would take like a day at worse to install your distro. My first attempt with NixOS took me almost 4 days of screwing around in configs. 2 of those days were probably cumulatively spent waiting for the config option list of the nixos manual to search for text. And the number of redundant config options which all do the same thing! Or, are supposed to all do the same thing but in actuality, only one of them does the thing they are supposed to.

I really want to love NixOS but it always ends up feeling like an exercise in my patience and time to do even the simplest of things. As such I find myself asking the question of, am I going to spend so much time reinstalling my distro that it’s ever worth this initial investment?

Anyways, rant over. I actually have been debating switching back over for another try again myself I just have some very frustrating memories of my first attempts with the distro.

I think I will give it a try on a server first, I don’t have a playbook or script for a reproducible set up (yet), so I may as well use Nix to see if it’s worth the hype

A simple bash script is not reproducible or deterministic. Also a filesystem rollback is not the same as NixOS’s generation based rollback.

Also, NixOS doesn’t just install packages, all system configuration is done declaratively, which would be a very bad idea to do via a bash script.

Part of the purpose of NixOS is providing a means to build a reproducible environment that’s easy to configure, migrate, and rollout. You can absolutely handle configuration of many different programs using either flakes or the native modules provided by nix. You can customize your entire system from firewall entries, to users and their shells, to the kernel itself and the kernel modules you’d want it to load, all in a single file or multiple files. If you want to try doing all those things in bash scripts, good luck and please share your experiences but don’t expect it to be as easy as the Nix ecosystem.

There is a world of difference between a bash script and something like NixOS. The most important difference is that with NixOS something that you don’t specify won’t be there. Whereas a bash script (or other config management tools like Puppet, Chef or Ansible) only mutate things listed.

So it is very easy to write a script like:

ensure_installed python3
write_file /etc/foo.cfg 'thing = 7'
chgrp users /mnt/backups

But if you remove ensure_installed python3 it will stay installed. You can try to be very careful and always add ensure_not_installed python3 but this is both error prone and dead code as soon as you run it. I used to have a script like this and I used each of configuration management tools mentioned above and always ran into these issues. The exact error flow would be something like this:

1. Enable/setup some service A that pulls in package X.
2. Disable service A or remove package X because it isn’t needed anymore.
3. Write configuration for service B.
4. Forget to add ensure_installed X but it works anyways because X is still installed from step 1.

Now you have a non-reproducible config because if you try to re-install or setup service B on a new machine it won’t work because X isn’t present. This may sound like a niche problem but I ran into it almost every time I tried to bring up a new machine using my config.

It is still possible to do this in NixOS as it isn’t completely reproducible (you can have mutable state) but in general it is much harder because any configuration that isn’t specified doesn’t exist. As soon as you remove package X or service Y from your config it is removed from your system. I’ve been using NixOS for 8 years now and this problem is mostly gone. It is definitely more reproducible than bash scripts and it has a tangible effect on my workflow.

I wrote a blog post about it a long time ago but the core is still relevant: https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/21/service-management-with-nixos/.