A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    13·
    6 hours ago

    Meanwhile me as a barbarian installing Debian and copying my ~/.bashrc file (and a few others) if not just remounting /home/ in the new installation every few years.

    • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      9 minutes ago

      One of my machines i’ve been just upgrading in place since debian 8. No need for new installation

      Debian isn’t barbaric at all.

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    151·
    7 hours ago

    I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

      Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

      I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
      For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

    • Phoenix3875@lemmy.world
      6·
      6 hours ago

      For DevOps, it provides consistency for every CI run and production deployment, especially when a whole system needs to be shipped.

    • feddup@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Loved nixOS but couldn’t install PIA VPN gui and disliked the workarounds. Also doing .net dev was more awkward than I liked so went back to Arch and wrote some scripts to install all the packages I want instead. Love the idea of nixOS though.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    6 hours ago

    Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

    But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.