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> As a keen NixOS user/contributor, if your only needs are i3 and Firefox, then I do not recommend NixOS to you. ~Any distribution can meet your needs. I reall

> As a keen NixOS user/contributor, if your only needs are i3 and Firefox, then I do not recommend NixOS to you. ~Any distribution can meet your needs. I really disagree with this. NixOS is also great for simple use cases like this because it's robust. I know a lot of people who switched to Linux, need to get something to work, follow some online tutorial/directions blindly, and just break shit pretty badly. This isn't contrived: even seemingly-inoculous commands like "pacman -Sy" on Manjaro/Arch can fuck your shit up (it basically amounts to a partial upgrade). NixOS doesn't let you break shit like this. (Literally, upgrades are atomic and packages can never have missing dependencies.) And, even if somehow you did, you then have a nice configuration.nix to quickly get back up to speed.

danieldk 6y ago
This is a benefit, but other distributions are catching up. For example, Fedora Silverblue has an immutable root filesystem and provides atomic upgrades/rollbacks through OSTree. Ubuntu 20.04 supports making ZFS snapshots as an APT pre-installation hook and thus also support rollbacks.
- pkulak 6y ago
  And don't forget OpenSUSE, which has been making btrfs snapshots before and after every upgrade for years(?) now. OpenSUSE doesn't seem to ever get the recognition it deserves.
eeh 6y ago
Sure, but Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora all provide great experiences for "I just want some packages installed". Fedora nowadays has btrfs-level rollbacks, which although this doesn't interact well with cfgmgmt (unlike NixOS's excellent rollback support), it's perfectly fine for an end user.
aastronaut 6y ago
Unfortunately I have to disagree. I tried to setup a simple NixOS machine this week. From this experience I couldn't manage to install any GNOME extensions via the browser plugin because of some Firefox manifest location that conflicts with the way the NixOS store handles it - there is some workaround in some tickets, but it made me wonder how many other applications are in need for specific workarounds. I then enabled flatpak via the OS configuration, but the first installed app couldn't launch because of some obscure error with gstreamer. I changed to fedora and could setup anything without any of those issues. I really want to like NixOS (I still do), but I now consider it more for a server environment than a casual desktop environment.
- danieldk 6y ago
  You can use NixOS on the desktop -- it has a lot of benefit (including atomic upgrades/rollbacks). But it only really works well if you manage everything through Nix. Other mechanisms such as the ones that you mention tend to break very often. I just gave up using Flatpaks with NixOS and install GNOME extensions through Nix.

danieldk 6y ago

This is a benefit, but other distributions are catching up. For example, Fedora Silverblue has an immutable root filesystem and provides atomic upgrades/rollbacks through OSTree. Ubuntu 20.04 supports making ZFS snapshots as an APT pre-installation hook and thus also support rollbacks.

pkulak 6y ago
And don't forget OpenSUSE, which has been making btrfs snapshots before and after every upgrade for years(?) now. OpenSUSE doesn't seem to ever get the recognition it deserves.

eeh 6y ago

Sure, but Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora all provide great experiences for "I just want some packages installed". Fedora nowadays has btrfs-level rollbacks, which although this doesn't interact well with cfgmgmt (unlike NixOS's excellent rollback support), it's perfectly fine for an end user.

aastronaut 6y ago

Unfortunately I have to disagree. I tried to setup a simple NixOS machine this week. From this experience I couldn't manage to install any GNOME extensions via the browser plugin because of some Firefox manifest location that conflicts with the way the NixOS store handles it - there is some workaround in some tickets, but it made me wonder how many other applications are in need for specific workarounds. I then enabled flatpak via the OS configuration, but the first installed app couldn't launch because of some obscure error with gstreamer. I changed to fedora and could setup anything without any of those issues. I really want to like NixOS (I still do), but I now consider it more for a server environment than a casual desktop environment.

danieldk 6y ago
You can use NixOS on the desktop -- it has a lot of benefit (including atomic upgrades/rollbacks). But it only really works well if you manage everything through Nix. Other mechanisms such as the ones that you mention tend to break very often. I just gave up using Flatpaks with NixOS and install GNOME extensions through Nix.