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I love how your reply (which mentions that you use NixOS) is at the top because it indirectly confirms my experience with Nix. I tried Nix on Debian only a coup

I love how your reply (which mentions that you use NixOS) is at the top because it indirectly confirms my experience with Nix. I tried Nix on Debian only a couple of weeks ago, and the main issue I had with Nix was that whenever I searched for an answer or other info relating to Nix, most of what I found was written by users of NixOS, not standalone Nix. It seemed that the overwhelming majority of people sharing info about Nix are users of NixOS. For example, notice how there are 4-5 times as many results when searching the web for "configuration.nix" (which is used with NixOS) than there are when searching for "config.nix" (which is used with standalone Nix): https://www.google.com/search?q=%22configuration.nix%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22configuration.nix%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22config.nix%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22config.nix%22 I got bored of wading through irrelevant search results, so I uninstalled Nix. (My experience with Guix was even worse, but in a different way.) When I want software that isn't in Debian's repos, I'll stick to installing it from source like I've been doing forever.

takeda 5y ago
Yes, the name is unfortunate. I search things by looking for nixpkgs. The nix on its own isn't really that complex, it is really the nixpkgs that is built on top of it and then NixOS that is built on top of nixpkgs.
jonringer117 5y ago
Outside of configuring your system, almost everything from NixOS is applicable to other distro's. The only notable exception I can think of are video drivers, and you will need nixGL for that. Otherwise, I would recommend looking at home-manager, it's essentially NixOS but for any linux distro, or even darwin with nix-darwin. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
aaronchall 5y ago
I used nix on Ubuntu as my daily driver for nearly a year before installing Nixos. I also installed it on a server and multiple desktops before that. My main pain point with nix on Ubuntu was gui stuff didn't work. But as a build tool it worked amazingly well. Using nix as an ad hoc package manager worked for non GUI stuff, though, but that wasn't all that interesting. Except it let me have the latest Python and haskell and so forth...

takeda 5y ago

Yes, the name is unfortunate. I search things by looking for nixpkgs. The nix on its own isn't really that complex, it is really the nixpkgs that is built on top of it and then NixOS that is built on top of nixpkgs.

jonringer117 5y ago

Outside of configuring your system, almost everything from NixOS is applicable to other distro's. The only notable exception I can think of are video drivers, and you will need nixGL for that. Otherwise, I would recommend looking at home-manager, it's essentially NixOS but for any linux distro, or even darwin with nix-darwin. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

aaronchall 5y ago

I used nix on Ubuntu as my daily driver for nearly a year before installing Nixos. I also installed it on a server and multiple desktops before that. My main pain point with nix on Ubuntu was gui stuff didn't work. But as a build tool it worked amazingly well. Using nix as an ad hoc package manager worked for non GUI stuff, though, but that wasn't all that interesting. Except it let me have the latest Python and haskell and so forth...