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Personally, NixOS cured my distro-hopping. I run it on my laptop, desktop, and all my servers, and I've never looked back. Honestly I couldn't imagine using any

• kevincox 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I wasn't a huge distro-hopper but I went from Ubuntu to Arch for rolling updates and no dist-upgrade mess and then settled on NixOS for the declarative config. First it was the "correct" version of Ansible/Puppet/Chef on servers and then on my desktop. It's amazing to have a system that isn't accumulating cruft as you tweak config files and to be able to completely set up a new system in an hour with all of my preferred config and applications. NixOS is dotfiles on steroids. On top of that you get easy dev environments with nix-shell and trivial rollbacks if something goes wrong. (gone are the days of manually reverting packages from the package manager's update log)
• theodric 4y ago
  Nix is something that requires me to write a config file to install a package, right? Sounds incredibly unappealing. Why am I wrong?
  • xcdzvyn 4y ago
    Write a line to a config file, yes. It's a consequence of Nix' goal of accountability, atomicity, and reproducibility. - If a package isn't listed in configuration.nix, it isn't installed. That's powerful information to have. - If you want multiple systems to run the exact same set of packages, you can do that trivially by just pointing them all to the same configuration. I suspect it would be much harder to provide a fair answer to the question of why you _wouldn't_ deem it important to know what software is installed on your computer. That seems like a pretty significant pitfall of most operating systems.