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I think there's too much focus on going whole-hog with NixOS, and not enough on just using Nix with home-manager on top of your existing distro. As the sibling

I think there's too much focus on going whole-hog with NixOS, and not enough on just using Nix with home-manager on top of your existing distro. As the sibling comment describes, Nix can get a bit gnarly once you're off the beaten path, and having your whole OS subject to that is a pain. But as an alternative approach I run Fedora, and install key stuff through the OS using dnf in the normal way, but then I have a home-manager config that covers all my key config, and a lot of the extra applications. Yes, I don't get the full "value" of a whole system under version control. But I have a very stable, well proven system with few surprises. And I also have good version control of my config and day to day apps. Plus the extra Nix stuff - if I want to try out a program, or use it temporarily I can just launch a shell with it and it's not cluttering up my system for ever (e.g. when exa was on HN yesterday, I could just do `nix-shell -p exa` to get a shell with exa in it. At some point in the future it'll get garbage collected again).

IHLayman 2y ago
I can talk to the opposite side about why I am very happy going all in with NixOS. Prior to that I was running dual-boot Windows (for games) and Ubuntu (for coding). Despite all of the progress made on gaming on Linux, I was still having problems with the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, sway refused to work, hyprland glitched out, and I was stuck on i3 (because I am a full convert to tiling windows managers). I used home-manager with Nix to manage my dotfiles and had been quite happy with that workflow. As the story goes, Ubuntu had just released 24.04 and I pushed to upgrade. My linux partition was on btrfs. I had been bitten by the snapshots-locking-my-system problem before so I cleared out all my snapshots (and backed up my drive to local NAS). During the update Ubuntu did ANOTHER SNAPSHOT, it took up all the space on device (256GB, yeah I should have had more space) and crashed the system. At that point I was finally done with all of the shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls with apt (not updating everything unless you have their subscription, forcing some installs to go through snapd, separate driver management from apt…), and this last update crashing my system’s boot, even though I could have recovered with my backup, was the last straw. I considered my experience with Ubuntu, and MSFT’s actions to integrate Copilot into the OS, and decided to wipe the entire 1TB drive and go all in with NixOS. I was able to move my home-manager config right over, get my configs all converted to flakes, and get hyprland set up all in less than an hour. Smoothest transition in a long time. I even was able to jump to the 6.8 kernel and things just started working again. I was finally able to play steam games well on my system again. I may even have a path to get my VR to work in Linux again. Are there still problems? Sure. Hyprland is a compromise because sway still won’t cooperate with Nvidia GPUs. But, when I have made changes that get me to a non-bootable state, I can boot to a previous generation directly from GRUB, see what went wrong, fix it, and get back to a good state. Having that ability to recover from a bad boot situation without hacking into a safe mode or GRUB console or rip the drive out and put it into another system was incredibly refreshing. I am not going back anytime soon.
- rkangel 2y ago
  TBH, I mostly find this to be a (very valid) story about why Ubuntu is problematic. Most of my team around me uses Ubuntu and periodically has to wrestle with some issue, and have to wipe and reinstall every year or so. This Fedora installation is 5 years old now. I have done a distro upgrade at least every year. It has worked extremely stabley and predictably all the way though, including the Fedora transition from X to Wayland.
  - kugurerdem 2y ago
    I recently helped my friend install his first Linux distro, Ubuntu. He told me he could not log in, and he kept getting back to the login page. I realized that he might be having problems related to his display manager installed by default. I made him go to virtual console and replace the default display manager so that he can start his desktop environment session without getting stuck in a display manager loop. I did not like my own Ubuntu experience when I was using few years before as well. I don't think its stable enough for newcomers as well.
pxc 2y ago
> As the sibling comment describes, Nix can get a bit gnarly once you're off the beaten path, and having your whole OS subject to that is a pain. For me, years and years ago, that 'pain' (having my whole 9S subject to Nix's constraints) is what pushed me to really learn it instead of just retreating to the traditional base system. It transformed learning Nix (and even sometimes writing packages or extending NixOS) into the path of least resistance to run the software I wanted or needed to use. And that was helpful for me. For others (and for me at other times in my life) I understand that this is not always the right approach. But it can be really good.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
I actually would go the other direction: I actually moved from Arch to NixOS just to get fully-supported out of the box ZFS support, including ZFS root. I had even intended to use NixOS as a thin layer that provided my "base" OS but run all the real stuff in distrobox (likely even with Arch in the container, effectively returning to my old setup but with ZFS underneath), but then when I actually used it I found it easier to just do most things natively.
- KolenCh 2y ago
  Depends on what support means. If support means root on ZFS can be installed effortlessly, then yes. But if support means if things failed and you can get support to fix it, then no.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > But if support means if things failed and you can get support to fix it, then no. Well, yes actually, you can get help in IRC/Matrix/etc. It's best effort and might not help, but it's not like commercial vendors promise fixes either. In any event, Arch is in the same position so that's not really an argument in favor of either one.
    - KolenCh 2y ago
      Right. I'd like to hear your experience with running OpenZFS on nixOS. E.g. how long have you tried it and your update cadence and robustness etc. I'm in my quest to find the "best supported" way to run ZFS on Linux and I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, RHEL, OpenSUSE. (I also tried FreeNAS (i.e. FreeBSD) in the past.) Ubuntu has knowingly made a version of OpenZFS with (with their own patch causing) data corruption bug in the stable release. So since then I lost trust in them. Arch Linux never officially supports it, and Arch's rolling release model with OpenZFS as kernel modules are not a good match for UX. RHEL with kABI tracking kmod maintained by upstream seems to be a great, robust support combination, but later I found out that the kABI is not fully covered so it working relies on a bit of luck. AFAIK, it is still not completely resolved. OpenSUSE with the "filesystem" project seems to be a semi-official support of seamless integration of OpenZFS with OpenSUSE. So far so good but I'm still evaluating. In principle, nix and nixOS should be quite robust from its design (practically reproducible build). But I am not trusting nix that much yet and prefer something more battle tested. Coincidentally, I like the documentation of all the previous OSes I mentioned above (where Ubuntu falls a bit shorter among the crowd.) And from my limited experience, nix and friends are quite poorly documented.

IHLayman 2y ago

I can talk to the opposite side about why I am very happy going all in with NixOS. Prior to that I was running dual-boot Windows (for games) and Ubuntu (for coding). Despite all of the progress made on gaming on Linux, I was still having problems with the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, sway refused to work, hyprland glitched out, and I was stuck on i3 (because I am a full convert to tiling windows managers). I used home-manager with Nix to manage my dotfiles and had been quite happy with that workflow. As the story goes, Ubuntu had just released 24.04 and I pushed to upgrade. My linux partition was on btrfs. I had been bitten by the snapshots-locking-my-system problem before so I cleared out all my snapshots (and backed up my drive to local NAS). During the update Ubuntu did ANOTHER SNAPSHOT, it took up all the space on device (256GB, yeah I should have had more space) and crashed the system. At that point I was finally done with all of the shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls with apt (not updating everything unless you have their subscription, forcing some installs to go through snapd, separate driver management from apt…), and this last update crashing my system’s boot, even though I could have recovered with my backup, was the last straw. I considered my experience with Ubuntu, and MSFT’s actions to integrate Copilot into the OS, and decided to wipe the entire 1TB drive and go all in with NixOS. I was able to move my home-manager config right over, get my configs all converted to flakes, and get hyprland set up all in less than an hour. Smoothest transition in a long time. I even was able to jump to the 6.8 kernel and things just started working again. I was finally able to play steam games well on my system again. I may even have a path to get my VR to work in Linux again. Are there still problems? Sure. Hyprland is a compromise because sway still won’t cooperate with Nvidia GPUs. But, when I have made changes that get me to a non-bootable state, I can boot to a previous generation directly from GRUB, see what went wrong, fix it, and get back to a good state. Having that ability to recover from a bad boot situation without hacking into a safe mode or GRUB console or rip the drive out and put it into another system was incredibly refreshing. I am not going back anytime soon.

rkangel 2y ago
TBH, I mostly find this to be a (very valid) story about why Ubuntu is problematic. Most of my team around me uses Ubuntu and periodically has to wrestle with some issue, and have to wipe and reinstall every year or so. This Fedora installation is 5 years old now. I have done a distro upgrade at least every year. It has worked extremely stabley and predictably all the way though, including the Fedora transition from X to Wayland.
- kugurerdem 2y ago
  I recently helped my friend install his first Linux distro, Ubuntu. He told me he could not log in, and he kept getting back to the login page. I realized that he might be having problems related to his display manager installed by default. I made him go to virtual console and replace the default display manager so that he can start his desktop environment session without getting stuck in a display manager loop. I did not like my own Ubuntu experience when I was using few years before as well. I don't think its stable enough for newcomers as well.

pxc 2y ago

> As the sibling comment describes, Nix can get a bit gnarly once you're off the beaten path, and having your whole OS subject to that is a pain. For me, years and years ago, that 'pain' (having my whole 9S subject to Nix's constraints) is what pushed me to really learn it instead of just retreating to the traditional base system. It transformed learning Nix (and even sometimes writing packages or extending NixOS) into the path of least resistance to run the software I wanted or needed to use. And that was helpful for me. For others (and for me at other times in my life) I understand that this is not always the right approach. But it can be really good.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

I actually would go the other direction: I actually moved from Arch to NixOS just to get fully-supported out of the box ZFS support, including ZFS root. I had even intended to use NixOS as a thin layer that provided my "base" OS but run all the real stuff in distrobox (likely even with Arch in the container, effectively returning to my old setup but with ZFS underneath), but then when I actually used it I found it easier to just do most things natively.

KolenCh 2y ago
Depends on what support means. If support means root on ZFS can be installed effortlessly, then yes. But if support means if things failed and you can get support to fix it, then no.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > But if support means if things failed and you can get support to fix it, then no. Well, yes actually, you can get help in IRC/Matrix/etc. It's best effort and might not help, but it's not like commercial vendors promise fixes either. In any event, Arch is in the same position so that's not really an argument in favor of either one.
  - KolenCh 2y ago
    Right. I'd like to hear your experience with running OpenZFS on nixOS. E.g. how long have you tried it and your update cadence and robustness etc. I'm in my quest to find the "best supported" way to run ZFS on Linux and I've tried Ubuntu, Arch, RHEL, OpenSUSE. (I also tried FreeNAS (i.e. FreeBSD) in the past.) Ubuntu has knowingly made a version of OpenZFS with (with their own patch causing) data corruption bug in the stable release. So since then I lost trust in them. Arch Linux never officially supports it, and Arch's rolling release model with OpenZFS as kernel modules are not a good match for UX. RHEL with kABI tracking kmod maintained by upstream seems to be a great, robust support combination, but later I found out that the kABI is not fully covered so it working relies on a bit of luck. AFAIK, it is still not completely resolved. OpenSUSE with the "filesystem" project seems to be a semi-official support of seamless integration of OpenZFS with OpenSUSE. So far so good but I'm still evaluating. In principle, nix and nixOS should be quite robust from its design (practically reproducible build). But I am not trusting nix that much yet and prefer something more battle tested. Coincidentally, I like the documentation of all the previous OSes I mentioned above (where Ubuntu falls a bit shorter among the crowd.) And from my limited experience, nix and friends are quite poorly documented.