5 ms·

I'd like to try NixOS, but from what I've seen, there are still a lot of issues trying to run it as a daily driver on a laptop. Has that been your experience?

I'd like to try NixOS, but from what I've seen, there are still a lot of issues trying to run it as a daily driver on a laptop. Has that been your experience? With Ubuntu, Debian, and even Arch, it's pretty much install and go. Also, it requires significant disk space, which I usually don't have on my laptops.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Tbh I'd recommend trying nix on top of another distro or on top of OSX first. If you just want the ability to install arbitrary versions of packages along side each other/have painless roll backs/bake config files into your install you can do that there. Once you get comfy with nix on top of another distro then think about whether you want that approach with the entire stack.
chpatrick 6y ago
I've had pretty much no problem on my ThinkPad. It always depends on how custom your setup is.
miloignis 6y ago
I've been using it as the daily driver on my laptop for a few years, and it's been great! Using it in general is a steepish learning curve, but I think it's very worth it. Having rollbacks for every upgrade just makes me sleep better, and it's saved my bacon more than once. Being able to customize the packages running on my system in a safe and reproducible way is great as well. It's also helped me do research, it's easy for me to build different versions of a package with different patches and compare their performance, etc.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Same. Rollbacks are awesome. Not only rollback in the boot menu, but also just keeping your OS configs in Git. It is so nice that I can mess with my configs without concern, then when I am done I can diff them too see what I changed, continue messing to clean them up a bit, then commit (or reset if the experiment didn't work out). When I used Arch I would edit a handful of configs trying to set up something new or tweak a setting and I could not get back. I would need to take notes or just try my best (I have force-reinstalled packages countless times). I'm also waiting for the parts of my new desktop to come in and I'm excited that all it takes is cloning my config repo and applying to get to exactly the same setup. With Arch I would have reinstalled to clear the cruft that has accumulated, however with NixOS I can just audit my configs to see an entire list of cruft and easily undo it by removing lines.
aidenn0 6y ago
I've been using it for almost 3 years on my laptop with no issues. As far as disk-space 50GB is generally enough if you collect the garbage periodically (my workstation is using a bit over 100GB after almost 2 years of running NixOS, but I don't think I've ever done garbage collection on it).
johnvaluk 6y ago
I run NixOS on a variety of laptops as my daily driver. While there's initially a steep learning curve, the time is well spent developing a reproducible configuration that you can quickly install on a new machine. I adapt the same configuration to generate a custom ISO that I write to a USB drive so I can boot into a familiar environment in a few minutes on almost any machine (running in RAM if there's enough room). It doubles as an installer (as does any NixOS installation). This approach is also handy for booting ephemeral servers on any hardware (DNS, DHCP, etc.). One of my hobbies is recycling older machines. I've installed NixOS on Chromebooks with 16GB internal drives. It's possible if you remember to garbage collect after each successful upgrade (and stick to 64-bit machines). I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space.
- monoideism 6y ago
  > I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space. I do the same, except I use an extensive dotfiles, config, and bootstrap script repo[0]. So I like the idea of Nix for that reason. It's going to be hard to let go of Debian/Ubuntu, but I'd really like to have a perfectly reproducible environment like Nix. Thanks for your reply. 0. however, I also unfortunately have to use Windows sometimes,so I dual boot, and that takes up significant room on my smallish laptop drive
  - johnvaluk 6y ago
    I also have my dotfiles in portable repositories that must work on a variety of unices (so I don't use the popular-but-nix-specific home-manager package). My custom ISO has no user data, it just creates my immutable account with my public SSH key (in case I need to remote into the machine immediately) and has a global alias named "bootstrap" that fetches and installs my dotfiles. After that, I can pull any updates made on other machines, log in and out of the DM, etc. until I turn off the computer. I've gone weeks on the same session in RAM (waking from sleep works fine on most machines).
  - Shoue 6y ago
    You should consider trying home-manager as the other reply mentioned, because it lets you stay in non-NixOS land until you get comfortable. I use my home-manager config both on NixOS and on Ubuntu to not only to handle stereotypical dotfiles like Neovim and Tmux, but also things like setting dconf keys so that GNOME is instantly set up the way I want it on any new installs.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

Tbh I'd recommend trying nix on top of another distro or on top of OSX first. If you just want the ability to install arbitrary versions of packages along side each other/have painless roll backs/bake config files into your install you can do that there. Once you get comfy with nix on top of another distro then think about whether you want that approach with the entire stack.

chpatrick 6y ago

I've had pretty much no problem on my ThinkPad. It always depends on how custom your setup is.

miloignis 6y ago

I've been using it as the daily driver on my laptop for a few years, and it's been great! Using it in general is a steepish learning curve, but I think it's very worth it. Having rollbacks for every upgrade just makes me sleep better, and it's saved my bacon more than once. Being able to customize the packages running on my system in a safe and reproducible way is great as well. It's also helped me do research, it's easy for me to build different versions of a package with different patches and compare their performance, etc.

kevincox 6y ago
Same. Rollbacks are awesome. Not only rollback in the boot menu, but also just keeping your OS configs in Git. It is so nice that I can mess with my configs without concern, then when I am done I can diff them too see what I changed, continue messing to clean them up a bit, then commit (or reset if the experiment didn't work out). When I used Arch I would edit a handful of configs trying to set up something new or tweak a setting and I could not get back. I would need to take notes or just try my best (I have force-reinstalled packages countless times). I'm also waiting for the parts of my new desktop to come in and I'm excited that all it takes is cloning my config repo and applying to get to exactly the same setup. With Arch I would have reinstalled to clear the cruft that has accumulated, however with NixOS I can just audit my configs to see an entire list of cruft and easily undo it by removing lines.

aidenn0 6y ago

I've been using it for almost 3 years on my laptop with no issues. As far as disk-space 50GB is generally enough if you collect the garbage periodically (my workstation is using a bit over 100GB after almost 2 years of running NixOS, but I don't think I've ever done garbage collection on it).

johnvaluk 6y ago

I run NixOS on a variety of laptops as my daily driver. While there's initially a steep learning curve, the time is well spent developing a reproducible configuration that you can quickly install on a new machine. I adapt the same configuration to generate a custom ISO that I write to a USB drive so I can boot into a familiar environment in a few minutes on almost any machine (running in RAM if there's enough room). It doubles as an installer (as does any NixOS installation). This approach is also handy for booting ephemeral servers on any hardware (DNS, DHCP, etc.). One of my hobbies is recycling older machines. I've installed NixOS on Chromebooks with 16GB internal drives. It's possible if you remember to garbage collect after each successful upgrade (and stick to 64-bit machines). I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space.

monoideism 6y ago
> I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space. I do the same, except I use an extensive dotfiles, config, and bootstrap script repo[0]. So I like the idea of Nix for that reason. It's going to be hard to let go of Debian/Ubuntu, but I'd really like to have a perfectly reproducible environment like Nix. Thanks for your reply. 0. however, I also unfortunately have to use Windows sometimes,so I dual boot, and that takes up significant room on my smallish laptop drive
- johnvaluk 6y ago
  I also have my dotfiles in portable repositories that must work on a variety of unices (so I don't use the popular-but-nix-specific home-manager package). My custom ISO has no user data, it just creates my immutable account with my public SSH key (in case I need to remote into the machine immediately) and has a global alias named "bootstrap" that fetches and installs my dotfiles. After that, I can pull any updates made on other machines, log in and out of the DM, etc. until I turn off the computer. I've gone weeks on the same session in RAM (waking from sleep works fine on most machines).
- Shoue 6y ago
  You should consider trying home-manager as the other reply mentioned, because it lets you stay in non-NixOS land until you get comfortable. I use my home-manager config both on NixOS and on Ubuntu to not only to handle stereotypical dotfiles like Neovim and Tmux, but also things like setting dconf keys so that GNOME is instantly set up the way I want it on any new installs.