14 ms·

Why I love NixOS

446 points by birkey 7mo ago

soumyaskartha 7mo ago
Most people who try Nix either quit in the first week or never go back to anything else. There is no in between.
- Daunk 7mo ago
  What would the in between be?
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    Gobolinux comes to mind. If you don't mind a very limited set of software, the way tinycorelinux is setup can also allow multiple different tcz installed These two Linux distros essentially allow two different versions of same software/libraries (glibc/python whatever) installed (Gobolinux explicitly states that whereas I find it to be an unintended but elegant consequence for tinycorelinux but I recommend taking a look at Gobolinux)
  - Diti 7mo ago
    Using a regular mutable system and Nix on top using Home Manager for example.
  - jwiz 7mo ago
    Use it for a month or two and decide it's not for you. That is in between "use it for very short period of time" and "use it forever"
  - DanielVZ 7mo ago
    Using it for a year or so and then try another OS is my guess
- troad 7mo ago
  This is a simple reflection of the fact that Nix has a steep learning curve. People who persist generally have deep-enough interest or a compelling-enough use case to power through. I feel like it's more of an indictment than praise; it implies Nix is relatively inaccessible to interested but time-constrained dabblers, which puts a hard cap on Nix's ability to outgrow its niche.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JamesSwift 6mo ago
    Yes, for me it was 2 or 3 rounds of "its just not clicking" before it did and then there was no looking back. Ive heard the same anecdote from lots of others as well.
- dizhn 7mo ago
  There is. Give it a go every few years and decide either Nix is not ready or I am not ready for it.
- ux266478 6mo ago
  I'm the inbetween. I stuck with it for a couple of months, but ended up dropping it. It's just too slow and incurs a massive complexity penalty that I'm not happy about. I'd rather just deal with tarball rootfses and union mounts if I want an immutable system (and overwhelmingly I do not.) The reproducible builds are nice and all, but I'm not in a position to really take advantage of it. I'm sure Nix is killer for a modern sysadmin. I'd much prefer just Plan 9. WORM filesystem and first-class namespaces.
loremm 7mo ago
This is niche and HN is full of these back and forth comments. One thing which a particular type of crowd will appreciate is being able to apply simple patches to constantly-up-to-date packages. For an example, I love atuin but it, by default, skips commands starting with space. Currently it's not configurable and while I wait for time to submit a PR or for the issue to be resolved, make a single line `patch` which just removes the part of the `if` statement which checks if it starts with space. So easy, took 5 minutes (also had to comment out 1 test). And now on home-manager debian or nixos server, I get up to date atuin with that one patch. It downloads rust, etc, compiles, and then that's garbage collected away
- 0x457 7mo ago
  Same but with kernel. What lead me to nixos: company gave me a laptop with iGPU that wasn't supported by any released linux kernel. There were patches waiting to be merged, with nixOS making an installer image that supports my machine was simple.
- kiliankoe 7mo ago
  I'm just curious what your motivation for the patch is, because I too use atuin and see the space-prefix as a feature. It's been around for a while (longer than atuin) to keep certain commands out of my history on purpose, like when running some one-off command with credentials as an arg. Other than that I very much agree, patching stuff is wonderful in nix-land! Especially when things in nixpkgs-unstable break.
nehalem 7mo ago
Although I’ve never committed to using nix system-wide, I do enjoy nix-based using https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ for the very reasons described in the article. It’s much easier than local containers for development.
- catlover76 7mo ago
  [dead]
- MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
  Can you help me understand why devenv is needed instead of a shell like this/what is gained? { pkgs }: pkgs.mkShell { nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ # build tools cmake ninja gnumake pkg-config ]; buildInputs = with pkgs; [ # java jdk8 # compilers gcc clang llvmPackages.libcxx # libraries capstone icu openssl_3 libusb1 libftdi zlib # scripting (python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ requests pyelftools ])) ]; # capstone headers are in include/capstone/ but blutter expects include/ shellHook = '' export CPATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPATH" export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH" ''; }
  - nehalem 7mo ago
    To be honest, I don’t know. I just enjoy the simplicity of devenv. It’s the right amount of user friendly.
  - fermuch 7mo ago
    devenv also has tasks/services. For example you need to start redis, then your db, then seed it, and only then start the server. All of that could be aliases, yeah, but if you define them as aliases you can have them all up with `devenv up`. It even supports dependencies between tasks ("only run the db after migrations ran")
  - shakow 7mo ago
bikelang 7mo ago
I don’t any experience with Nix - but how does it handle software which runs its own updating processes outside the package manager? Specifically thinking about software like Discord, Slack, Docker Desktop, Jetbrains Toolbox, etc. Is the Nix-ism to just reject using such software?
- uncletaco 7mo ago
  No there’s a nerd who will obsessively submit the latest version of any popular software that does that to nixpkgs. Or suggest you use the flatpak.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
    Except if you go look at nixpkgs half of the technologies grandparent listed are either missing entirely or in a hilariously broken state. The true answer is that there is just some software that is antithetical to the philosophy of nix. It’s not necessarily nix’s fault that this is the case, but their purism towards resisting opaque binary blobs going into the store reflects on the actual state of what’s available in nix. You need some impure, nonreproducible way of managing that software. So on nix Darwin I let these opaque binary blobs manage themselves via homebrew and use nix for every other case possible
  - zamalek 7mo ago
    I generally use flatpak for things that are important to keep extremely updated, e.g. my browser for vulnerability reasons.
- MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
  really good question. right now I have bought into the Nix koolaid a bit. I have NixOS Linux machines and then nix-darwin on my Mac. I use Nix to install Brew and then Brew to manage casks for things like Chrome what I'm sure updates itself. So the "flake.lock" probably isn't super accurate for the apps you described.
- whytevuhuni 7mo ago
  That's not much different than other distros, because the way auto-update usually works, is it can't use root permissions or the system package manager (in any distro), so it has to install the newer version in $HOME. Once the update is installed, the system package becomes a trampoline to that. I tried Discord, and this one seems to download some updates on first run, but the version sticks to the one from the system (0.0.127, latest is 0.0.129). So I assume it just doesn't update, or it tries to and fails.
fareesh 7mo ago
doesn't it use up a lot of disk space compared to other distros because of the way everything is set up?
- Valodim 7mo ago
  Yes. But disk space isn't exactly the most valuable resource you have as a developer/power user
- bspammer 7mo ago
  Yep disk space and learning curve are the two major downsides to Nix. The former has never been a problem for me in practice, just run garbage collection once a month. The latter was a big problem, but is now mitigated for most people by LLMs.
  - Pay08 7mo ago
    Disk space is not an issue as long as you don't try to install the entirety of Texlive.
- moonlion_eth 7mo ago
  actually once I garbage collect, nixos actually uses up less disk space for me than other distros
- exitb 7mo ago
  Yes, however the space is not „used up” in a classic sense. It’s a cache, so you can give up some of it and reclaim your space. Fresh after a full cleanup it won’t take much more than a regular distro.
- dandanua 7mo ago
  Use nix.optimise.automatic = true in the config and perform nix-collect-garbage if necessary. With this it doesn't take much.
- CafeRacer 6mo ago
  Yes, but you can also reclaim your space. I've configured nix to only store two latest revisions and have a ./switch.sh file that automatically clears everything up after applying nix. I had issues when giving boot partition only 512mb, so I'd recommend going with 1G.
erichocean 7mo ago
What I'd like to see is Omarchy implemented via the Nix package manager. (Seems like a good project for AI, actually.)
- Cyph0n 7mo ago
  Already exists, although I don’t know how well maintained it is: https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix Personally, I don’t see the need for this with NixOS. Setting aside the fact that Omarchy is way too opinionated (Basecamp installed by default?), NixOS is already quite composable, so you can easily build a well-formed experience out of isolated NixOS modules.
- rounce 7mo ago
  Why? Most people’s system configurations are publicly accessible on GitHub. Stuff like Omarchy only makes sense* when the system must be configured imperatively and there is a cost to trying things (accumulation of application residue). When you build your system declaratively you can just copy the bits you like from other people’s configs, or even just run their config as-is. * IMO Omarchy doesn’t make sense anyway, far too much opinion and too little utility. It’s not a distro it’s some guy’s overly promoted pile of crufty scripts and dotfiles.
- CafeRacer 6mo ago
  You can point AI to omarchy repo and have it generate a plan and them implement step by step. My entire config is almost "omarchy", at least visually with hyprland and some other packages.
quchen 7mo ago
The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn! I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age yet though, and trying out NixOS in a VM is not only easy, it is practical – in the sense that when you’re happy, you can simply boot that same config/OS anywhere else by just installing that config. And I’ll never forget that one time where I completely borked my everything in the VM, did a kernel rollback with like 3 command line args and a reboot, and the OS was, well, rolled back. As I said, almost platonic. What I can recommend is using nix-the-package-manager. Whenever I need the newest version of something, `nix-env -i <whatever>` and it’s there and works. If it doesn’t, roll back. If I need a different version, that’s on nixpkgs as well, with the same negligible amount of friction.
- Pay08 7mo ago
  Obligatory Guix plug. I've found it way easier to understand, but it has teething issues that NixOS doesn't (latest for me was a few problems with DMs). And according to an acquaintance of mine, it works reasonably well with an LLM.
- colordrops 7mo ago
  Flakes are de facto standard at this point. Expressions are easy once you get used to them - in fact the Nix language grows on many of us, including myself, once you internalize it. Using AI to generate Nix config is a superpower. Because the entire system is declared in a single set of config, you can basically spell cast any system you want. I one-shotted a Linux distro with custom branding for boot, installation screen, and login screen, and VPN and dev tools installed and configured by default, at a fortune 500 tech company.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  I'm not sure if I live in some kind of parallel world, because I never had any problems grokking Nix or NixOS. I started with this book[0] and haven't ever really been confused. [0]: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world
epolanski 7mo ago
What I like most about nixos is that you can have deterministically cached packages you don't need to rebuild every time in your ci. It's also simple to setup dev environments with nix.
- bikelang 7mo ago
  Nix in CI seems like a really excellent match. I don’t care much about the ATproto space - but Tangled has built their CI system on Nix and I find that really compelling. CI Caching is just awful with GitHub actions - so it made me disappointed that Forgejo went that route.
  - Norfair 7mo ago
    This is exactly why I made https://nix-ci.com/ https://nix-ci.com/ And it supports Forgejo, GitHub, and GitLab.
  - shae 7mo ago
    I use https://garnix.io/ https://garnix.io/ for all my Nix CI, works great.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
BoredPositron 7mo ago
The problem I have with nix is that I just don't need another hobby. Keeping everything up to date in an ever changing environment like an os just looks like chore. I install my system and image it every week and keep maybe the initial and a monthly snapshot. Why would nix be better in my case? Maybe I am missing something essential but I also don't bork my system that often tbh.
- qiine 7mo ago
  nixos updates tend to be a lot less eventful than others distro, in fact the way it largely prevent system borking when updating, is spiritually freeing.
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  Imo it's the opposite. Since the system is defined in config files, an AI agent can look at live system state/errors vs. the config file and do all the work of figuring out the issue. Also, using higher level modules like home manager makes things more declarative and less fiddly since someone else is maintaining the lower level. Maybe nix is a downgrade for what you do. But I loved nix so much that I also migrated to nix on macOS (nix-darwin). No more homebrew.
- overtone1000 7mo ago
  For me, it's the difference between taking your medicine a bit at a time on your own schedule or taking it all at once as an unwelcome surprise. Sure, setting up file system mounts or adding udev entries is easier to do once in Ubuntu than in NixOS, but I only need to do it the one time with NixOS. Thereafter, the config serves as both documentation and backup. For a hobby self hoster like me who occasionally shoots himself in the foot and has to rebuild a system, it is ideal. I don't know if it really saves me time, but I do know it saves my sanity. I am no nix whiz, but it's the only OS I run outside of containers. Anything I can't easily get with my nix config I shove into a container, run it as a quadlet, and call it good.
- Pay08 7mo ago
  The configuration system is way more stable than it seems. You write it once and then pretty much never touch it again.
dangirsh 7mo ago
My love for NixOS really became clear when I realized I never have to write Nix again by hand. A WIP NixOS config for working with agents: https://github.com/dangirsh/tsurf https://github.com/dangirsh/tsurf
- redrove 7mo ago
  Same. I have a full homelab and multiple macs, can’t say I’ve written a line of real Nix code by hand. If you’re itching to try Nix, now is the time.
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    Same. Can't imagine going back to the status quo where my system is the accumulation of terminal commands over time instead of a config file.
    - redrove 7mo ago
      Not to mention the non-idempotent python + bash + ssh hell of Ansible, or awful DSLs such as Salt, Puppet, Chef, etc.
edent 7mo ago
I'd love NixOS more if they had any decent documentation. Everything seems scattered around a dozen forums, a hundred old blog posts, and a thousand issues of "this work on my machine (3 releases ago)".
- exe34 7mo ago
  ChatGPT is very good at pulling it together to give you working code. Not on the first try, but on the third try it usually works.
  - moonlion_eth 7mo ago
    my entire system is configured using a flake i built with coding agent and skills to tell it how to configure things in nixos heh
  - qiine 7mo ago
    Pasting the generally horrible error messages is also quite effective!
    - fragmede 7mo ago
      Pasting? Give Claude/codex the ability to go fix it itself and have it deal with it directly.
      - exe34 7mo ago
        no thank you, there are things I do not want Claude to have rwx on. like my entire f*cking system. I run llms in a docker container with just the folder I'm working in.
        CyberShadow 7mo ago
        If you grant access to the Nix daemon socket but not writing outside the current directory, that's an effective sandbox. It allows evaluating derivations but not actually installing them.
moonlion_eth 7mo ago
nixos is love. nixos is life. once you grok it, there's no going back. see you on the other side.
voigtk 7mo ago
I love Nixos. Having a deterministic system is such a great way to know what your system is capable of. The only thing that bothers me is that when I rebuild my system after updating the lock file, if a package is broken the whole upgrade become impossible.
DHolzer 7mo ago
I switched over to Nix about a year ago. I was a Windows user before that for 30 years and tried Linux a couple of times, but it never stuck. Now I know I will never touch Windows again. With NixOS I've finally found a system that actually works for me — and the full OS configuration is in a repo. My god, I love it so much. Sometimes I even prefer nix-shells over uv for quick one-off Python scripts. I cannot sufficiently convey how absolutely barbaric everything else feels in comparison. Not having Nix would be like having to work on code without Git — absolutely unacceptable. And it really isn't that much work — you do it once. The next time you set up a new system, without Nix, you'll have to do the full configuration all over again.
- stephen_cagle 7mo ago
  Have you heard of any good projects for running isolated containers in NixOS that are cheaply derived from your own NixOS config? Because that is what I want. I want a computer where I can basically install every non stock app in its own little world, where it thinks "huh, that is interesting, I seem to be the only app installed on this system". Basically, I want to be able to run completely unverified code off of the internet on my local machine, and know that the worst thing it can possibly due is trash its own container. I feel like NixOS, is one path toward getting to that future.
  - woleium 7mo ago
    sounds like you want qubes os https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/
  - bpavuk 7mo ago
    depends whether you consider rootless Docker "cheap". I tried running ZeroClaw in a Nix-derived Docker (spoiler - it was a bad idea to use ZeroClaw at all since the harness is very buggy) and there is still a potential for container escape zero-days, but that's the best I've found. also, Nix's own containerization is not as hermetic as Docker; they warn about that in docs
  - gallexme 7mo ago
    If containers are safe enough for ur use case then just use nixos containers they just a few more lines to setup in a regular nixos config If it isn't enough there's microvm.nix which is pretty much the same in difficulty /complexity, but runs inside a very slim and lightweight VM with stronger isolation than a container
schindlabua 7mo ago
After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way. It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.
- tombert 7mo ago
  Yeah, I've been using Unixey stuff for almost twenty years now (most of it Linux, and fell for the siren song of macOS for about four of them). I liked Arch and Ubuntu and Mint and OpenSUSE well enough when I used them first, but once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything. Being able to temporarily install things with nix-shell is game changing, and being able to trivially see what's actually installed on my computer by quickly looking at my configuration.nix is so nice. "Uninstalling" things boils down to "remove from configuration.nix and rebuild". The automatic snapshots upon each build allows me to be a lot "braver" when playing with configurations than I was with Arch. I was always afraid to mess with video card or wifi drivers, because if I screwed something up and if I didn't know how to get back to where I was, I might be stuck reinstalling to get back to a happy state. This didn't happen that often but often enough to have made me a bit weary about futzing with boot parameters or kernel modules. Because of the automatic snapshots with NixOS, it's much easier (and more fun) to poke with the lower level stuff, because if I do break something in a way that I don't know how to fix, the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. For example, with my current laptop, there was a weird quirk with my USB devices having to "wake up" after not being used for more than thirty seconds, meaning that I might start typing and the first three or four words wouldn't go through. After some digging, I found out that the solution is to add "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" to the kernel params. I did that and it worked. If I had still been running Arch or Ubuntu, I probably would have just learned to put up with it, because I would have been afraid to edit kernel parameters because of the risk of breaking things in a way that I don't know how to fix. I love NixOS. I have no desire to leave, or at least I have no desire to abandon the model. I've considered changing to GNU Guix System since I like Lisp more than I like the Nix language, but those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.
atcol 7mo ago
NixOS is great. Nix the language is just awful. I still use it for my Dev laptop and for Home Manager on all my devices.
- tombert 7mo ago
  You know, I'm not going to say I'm enamored with the language, but I think the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in because I really don't hate the language so much anymore. I mean, I'm only ever using it for configurations, and I think I'd still prefer writing Nix than YAML. I probably wouldn't like writing a full "program" with Nix, but I don't think anyone does that?
  - kgwxd 7mo ago
    Sounds like every programming language on the planet. Just skip the "i'm unfamiliar with it, so i hate it" phase, and everything will be fine. People spend more time repeating that simple POV, using thousands of varying words, than is healthy. Just shut up, and do the work. And if you're not going to put in the work, just shut up, and let everyone else get to work.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      I mean I don't know that I agree with that completely. Languages can still be actively awful even if you do learn them. I have written a lot of PHP. In order to learn it I bought several books, I've done a dozen or so projects with it at various jobs, I've written both trivial and non-trivial things, and I have come to the conclusion that PHP is an actively terrible language [1]. It's inconsistent and hard to write in any kind of maintainable way with an ugly syntax and generally-crappy performance for any kind of logic beyond CRUD. [1] At least version 5, which is the last version I've used. I've heard 7 is better but I'll never know because I swore an oath in blood that I would not do PHP again for less than a million dollars a year.
- choward 6mo ago
  There are so many people complaining about the Nix language while offering zero constructive criticism. I was a little skeptical about them using a custom language at first. But then as I used it more it grew on me and I understand why it is the way it is. People just seem to want to complain because it doesn't look like any of their favorite languages and they aren't familiar with functional languages. At this point, I can't imagine using any other language in place of Nix. The code would have so much noise and be much harder to read.
vluft 7mo ago
nix & nixos are by far the worst way to manage system configuration, except for any other way that's been tried. imagine if there was something with declarative system configuration _not_ written in an insane undebuggable recursive nightmare of a language/stdlib? oh well, I'll keep using it, because what other options are there?
- gausswho 7mo ago
  guix would like a word
  - rowanG077 7mo ago
    I mean it's pretty wild to take s-expressions and not call them extremely terrible to read. The nix language sucks really badly, but I gladly take it over writing S-expressions.
    - Pay08 7mo ago
      It reads almost the exact same as any functional C-style language. Not to mention that specifically for Guix, you're going to be writing the (name value) form for 99% of it.
      - rowanG077 7mo ago
        I don't agree at all. Just look at these derivations: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/packages/electronics.scm https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/package... I counted and you regularly see this: "))))))))))" at the end. This is not a language that is optimizing for being written by humans.
        Pay08 7mo ago
        That link isn't working for me (something about AI detection), but as a point of accuracy, those aren't derivations, they're simple source files. Derivations are generated out of them. As for the closing braces, would it be better if you had a newline between each?
shevy-java 7mo ago
NixOS kind of extends the idea of reproducible builds. Any snapshot could be a guarantee that things just work. This can also be extended onto the user base - if one user has solved a problem, it should be solved for all of them. So we can jump from guarantee to guarantee here. My only gripe with NixOS is Nix. I think that this is also the biggest drawback of NixOS. I don't have an alternative; but perhaps it may be better to allow any format to be used, rather than force nix onto everyone. Another issue is that, for a reason I don't quite understand, a few years ago NixOS' quality appears to have gone down, e. g. nobody cares about documentation anymore. This is probably not a huge obstacle per se, but I did not feel I should invest that much into nix (which I dislike) when the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Ironically this also means that the whole idea behind NixOS, falls flat, if the documentation is poor. They really should make the same guarantees for their documentation, just as they do for the software ecosystem too. Nobody cares about documentation anymore though - AI has won. Just try finding high quality documentation via google search; it is slop world now.
ocimbote 7mo ago
I tried NixOS and failed miserably. I've pointed at to the Fedora Atomic distros, which are also immutable, and apparently incomparably easier to setup. I'm tempted to give it a shot, with the extra bonus that I've never dabbed with a fedora-based distro.
- ydj 7mo ago
  I tried fedora silverblue for a while, but the way it works is that it builds a new root fs image whenever you change the installed packages, this makes system package changes take comparatively long vs a traditional os. They suggest installing most apps via flatpak, which is okay as long as you can deal with flatpak idiosyncrasies. I also tried fedora coreos for a vm + container host, but found the recommended method to configure the system with ignition files and one shot systemd units to be too involved for making a one off system, and it’s probably better for a cloud deployment with many identical nodes.
  - Pay08 7mo ago
    In all fairness, Nix is similarly slow.
- et1337 7mo ago
  I’ve been driving Bluefin DX for a year or two. On the plus side, it works absolutely flawlessly. This is the longest I’ve ever run a Linux distro without a Nvidia driver update causing the whole thing to explode. It truly is the year of Linux on the desktop. But I can’t say I recommend it for dev work. It wants you to do everything inside devcontainers, which I like in theory but in practice come with so many annoyances. It wants you to install Flatpaks but Flathub is pretty sparse. I ended up downloading raw Linux binaries into my home directory (which actually works surprisingly well. Maybe this is the future, hah) I think next time I’ll just go with vanilla Fedora.
sidkshatriya 7mo ago
[From the article "Why I love NixOS"] > There is also community-maintained support for FreeBSD, though I have not used it personally I have tried to use the nix package manager on FreeBSD recently. I tried doing some basic things without success. Seems quite broken and unusable, which is a pity because nix on macOS seems decent. FreeBSD is much closer to Linux so there is no technical reason why nix can't be a success on FreeBSD. nix on FreeBSD just needs more contributors to fix bugs and make popular packages work ! I wonder if it will ever happen. FreeBSD is niche and nix is somewhat niche (still). It's a double niche problem !
copirate 7mo ago
One thing I love about NixOS is how easy it is to run packages from different sources. For example, I needed an old package that's been removed from nixpkgs several years ago. To run it I just had to add an old release of nixpkgs as input to my flake.nix and add the package from this input. It pulls all its dependencies from that old release and there's zero conflict with the other packages.
sirtimbly 7mo ago
All the fun of Terraform with none of the profitability.
- rgoulter 7mo ago
  For a single machine? Yeah, NixOS' cost surely outweighs the benefits if you're not familiar with Nix. Using Nix for per-project development dependencies is quite good. It's nice to be able to return to a project & not have to fuss over which tools/libraries need to be installed.
alembic_fumes 7mo ago
The author almost touches on the one more topic that I adore about Nix, but ends up just so missing it: NixOS is absolutely incredible for its ability to be configured through AI tooling. And I don't mean that it's better than other operating systems, I mean that it's the only game in town. I've been using Nix, both the package manager and the operating system, for years by now. I agree with all of the author's points, it really does deliver, the declarative nature is superb, and there's this constant sense of "hey my stuff is not breaking by itself" when working on it. And it's that declarative, rollback-able, file-based foundation, that makes it the perfect operating system for telling a coding agent to go to town on. Would I trust Claude to switch my audio stack from Pulseaudio to Pipewire on Ubuntu? Would I trust Codex to install Hyprland on Fedora so I can test out the session? No, in fact I would not trust any agent to do any of those things on any other operating system. But I would trust even goddamn Grok to do that on NixOS, because I can 1) audit the changes before anything is done, and 2) rollback, rollforward, roll-whatever-the-way-I-want-even-on-the-floor-if-I-want-to because of the years of built up confidence proving that IT JUST WORKS. I concede that this is turning into an unhinged loveletter to Nix, but really, it's the only operating system that lets one operate with this level of confidence. And I know most people don't care about that, since most people don't usually bother to tweak their OSes or switch out window managers, but as someone that does that, I'm never going back to mutable distros. This security is my table-stakes now, and the others aren't willing to pay up. So for the developers out there on the lookout for their "Year of the Linux Desktop 2026" -distribution, if you're already using AI assistants, give NixOS a try. Maybe start with this in an empty Git repository: "Hey Claude, I wanna try NixOS. Make me a Flake-based starter config using Gnome that I can demo in a virtual machine. If nix isn't yet installed, install it via determinate-systems installer. Include a "vm" target in the flake for building the image, and a small bash script that builds and launches the VM using whatever virtualization is available on my platform."
- sshine 7mo ago
  As a NixOS user for 3 years, and a Claude user for 1+ year, I agree with you that it's an ideal fit. I've been very happy with, for example, how Claude can configure GNOME via dconf settings: tweaking those settings declaratively requires cross-domain knowledge and knowing where to dig. But Claude just knows. But trying to set up an environment for one of those perpetually running AIs, and asking it to refactor its own configuration according to some of the high-level abstractions like dendritic flake-parts, and so on, it's just clueless and will improvise without success. What makes Nix hard for humans also makes Nix hard for AIs: Untyped lambdas that get resolved in some implied out-of-file context means you have to know if you're looking at a NixOS module, a home-manager module, a nix-darwin module, a flake-parts module, and so on. And those modules may make assumptions about what's imported in the parent scope. So I feel like you need to supply a rather extensive context for your project that details how you want things structured, because the ecosystem is quite fragmented, people don't fully agree on what good patterns are, and so the AI can't know what the good patterns are. Just to be absolutely clear: I think that supplying an extensive context is absolutely worth it, and I'm having great joy and success building better Nix-based project templates, Nix-based deployment templates, etc. The amount of stable, well-made projects made by other Nix users is just amazing.
deleted 7mo ago
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dewey 7mo ago
I've recently switched to nix as a way to encode my environment across my server and work / private devices a bit more than just having some Brewfiles. I know it's not worth it for the computer switch every few years but having a somewhat opinionated place to centralize my config is worth it over regular dot files. My first impression after a week of using: - I really dislike the complexity of terraform, and this is very similar - The UX is pretty bad, the commands and flags are hard to memorize and you basically need a shell alias for any regular commands to clean them up - The commands you run regularly like applying your nix config to the system after adding some new packages or config options look like: "nix run nix-darwin -- switch --flake /Users/philipp/repos/github.com/dewey/nix#private"". The output is a mix between expected warnings and way to verbose for something that should essentially be the equivalent of "brew update / brew upgrade". I'll stick with it as I didn't find anything better and LLMs are great for building up the config over time, but there's definitely room for some improvements.
- rounce 7mo ago
  Add `nix-darwin` to your path (it probably already is on it) and run it while in the directory of the flake: "nix-darwin switch --flake .#private"
- the_real_cher 6mo ago
  I just make my terminal history infinite and ctrl+r "flake".
- rkomorn 6mo ago
  I really want to like NixOS (and I mostly do) but the weirdness of the split between NixOS and HomeManager (and the fact that without HomeManager, you need another solution to manage your user-level configs) made it come up a bit short for me.
sdsd 7mo ago
I feel the same way about Guix with nonguix channel enabled. NixOS is awesome but I prefer Guile to Nix's language and I enjoy the docs more. But definitely sister OSes.
- globular-toast 7mo ago
  There's nowhere near enough love for Guix. I don't understand it. It has far better foundations. I would never invest time into some "config language". Using a real programming language has huge benefits, and it's a good one (Scheme).
  - SirHumphrey 7mo ago
    It also has very slow rebuild times.
devnotes77 7mo ago
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gradstudent 7mo ago
I tried NixOS a few months ago, when I had to choose a new OS for my laptop. On the one hand, it's great, as so many others here and TFA have attested. Declaratively specifying your system configuration and using snapshots to keep track of everything is a complete game-changer. Similarly great is the absolutely huge universe of installable packages. The coverage here is so much better than what's on offer from Ubuntu or Fedora. On the other hand, the current implementation is still a bit of a shit-show. First, there's nix-the-OS and nix-the-package-manager which is pretty confusing. Effectively it means you manage your OS with one declarative system and your local/home config with another. Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood, that seem to offer a different modality altogether. Second, installing packages is nice, but also confusing. Do you install a package or a service? Often both are available and the difference is not always clear. Eventually I learned to choose a service whenever one was available. In either case, the tendency of package maintainers is to install the smallest possible version of whatever you asked for. For example, I wanted KDE but what I got was a bare minimum version with plenty of missing apps and functionality that could only be fixed by adding extra components, one at a time, after debugging whatever was currently breaking. I appreciated that services and packages can be configured in the configuration file. But the options exposed are usually a partial set of what's available -- without extending the installations scripts yourself. So now my "declarative" config is a mix of what's in my nixOS config file and what's in my manually edited /etc files. Third, the documentation, mentioned by others, is a mess. There's all kinds of information about old and new versions. The interfaces of the command-line tools seem to have changed between the 25.05 stable that I chose and the then-upcoming 25.11, which made following-along harder than it needed to be. I eventually gave up because I needed a working machine and not a new hobby. I was left with the impression that NixOS might be a good choice for system admins, but perhaps not yet ready for desktop Linux users.
- zamalek 7mo ago
  I can completely understand how you were driven away. If you ever want to give it a go again: > there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood Nix never clicked for me until I started using flakes. There's a lot of internal drama surrounding them that honestly childish; that's why they are marked as experimental and not the official recommendation. You are going to have a worse time with Nix if you go with the official recommendation, flakes are significantly more intuitive. The Determinate Systems installer enables them by default, and whatever documentation they have is on the happier path (except for FlakeHub, I haven't figured that one out yet). On the most fundamental level, flakes allow you to take /etc/nixos/nixos.nix (or whatever, it has been forever) out of /etc and into a git repository. Old-style nix may be able to do that, but I discovered flakes before trying. I did previously attempt to use git on /etc/nix, but git was falling to pieces with bizarre ownership problems. What this means is that I could install and completely configure a machine, once booted into a nix iso, by running: nixos-install --flake https://github.com/.../repo.git https://github.com/.../repo.git. I manage all of my system config out of /home/$user/$clone As for /home there is home-manager and, again, you are not steered towards it (the tutorial pushes you towards nix profiles/nix-env instead). Home-manager will do for your home directory what the system config does for your system, and has many program modules. You can even declare home-level systemd units and whatnot. > manually edited /etc files. You can use environment.etc for these files[1]. systemd.tmpfiles can be used for things outside of etc. Home-manager has the equivalent for .config, .local, .cache. [2]. [1]: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=environment.etc&show=environment.etc https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=envi... [2]: https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/?query=xdg.configFile&release=release-25.11 https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/?query=xdg.configF...
zamalek 7mo ago
> services.desktopManager.gnome.extraGSettingsOverrides = You can set dconf settings more declaratively: https://tangled.org/jonathan.dickinson.id/nix/blob/7c895ada8889f05cf440cd527fb7d2af2f6571ff/home/common/gnome.nix https://tangled.org/jonathan.dickinson.id/nix/blob/7c895ada8...
Havoc 7mo ago
> I can specify the whole OS including the packages I need and the configuration in one declarative setup. That one place aspect matters to me more than it might sound at first. It took me less than a day of experimenting with it to learn that it is one place only in theory. The second you start googling „how do I install xyz“ you discover there are also flakes. And others have some sort of convoluted git like method. And there is a package manager thing. And the direct config file editing like in this article. And a disposable temp install of some sort. And naturally software guides don’t give you instructions for all - they’re opinionated. Felt a lot like being on Debian and the software only comes in .rpm That really took the wind out of my sails because like OP I liked the basic config file part
- Hasnep 7mo ago
  I see your point about there being different ways to install a package, but I think I can clarify a bit by explaining how I use NixOS. If I'm running a package on a server that means I want to install it declaratively, so I find the name of the package in Nixpkgs and put it in my `configuration.nix` file. I'm using flakes, but the configuration is exactly the same, I just put the package in the output section of the flake. Any instructions you see to install a package just boils down to finding the name of the package. To me this is as simple as finding the name of a Debian package and running `apt` to install it. If you want additional features there are other optional ways to install packages, but these are features other distros don't offer, so if you just ignore them then there's no extra complexity compared to Debian for example.
chenzhekl 7mo ago
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bivlked 7mo ago
i've been tempted by NixOS for servers but keep going back to Debian. the reproducibility is amazing in theory, but when you need to debug a DKMS kernel module build at 2am on a VPS, having "just apt install" is worth a lot. maybe NixOS for dev workstations, Debian for production VPS is the right split.
- rounce 7mo ago
  The reproducibility is amazing in reality: you either just run the misbehaving server’s config in a VM (one command) or spin up a throwaway VPS and apply the config to that (one command and about 60s). One of the major benefits of reproducibility is not having to poke at production machines because that’s the one place you can manifest the issue, now you can reproduce the in-production issues in a safe environment and fix them there.
- FinnKuhn 7mo ago
  I think the most interesting use case I have seen so far was for computers that control industrial equipment where you want identical installs on potentially dozens of machines.
baalimago 7mo ago
"Loving" any OS is strange to me. It's just a tool. I don't love my kitchen knife, or car. Nor do I love my computer, or any application on it. Web3, Rust, NixOS. The holy trinity of cult-like appreciation. I do wonder what brings forth such fanaticism.
- globular-toast 7mo ago
  I love my kitchen knife and I love Emacs. More love is a good thing. Unless you're the kind of person who thinks not loving is better because you've got nothing to lose.
  - baalimago 7mo ago
    To me, loving inanimate "trivial" things diminishes the value of love. I love my girlfriend and my pets. I like my kitchen knife and my car. To bunch up both into the same category confuses things into "which one do I love the most", some sort of spectrum of love. In the case of a fire, I'm sure you wouldn't prioritize your laptop with NixOS over your cat (let's imagine that the only backup is in the house that's on fire).
    - globular-toast 7mo ago
      No, you don't have to rank things, there's your mistake. Stop ranking things.
      - baalimago 7mo ago
        If I say "Girlfriend, I love equally to my operative system" I'm in for a world of trouble.
        globular-toast 7mo ago
        Don't say it then. Nobody is forcing you to rank anything.
    - 7mo ago
abdullin 7mo ago
I liked NixOS pre-LLM era, since it allowed me to manage a couple of servers in a reproducible way. Ability to reboot back to a stable configuration felt like magic. Nowadays I love it, since I can let Codex manage the servers for me. “Here is the flake, here is nix module for the server, here is the project source code. Now change all of that so that wildcard certificates work and requests land through systemd socket on a proper go mux endpoint. Don’t come back until you verify it as working” 5 minutes later it came back.
russellclare 7mo ago
The versoining and ability roll back is game changing for SRE Agents and preventing their ability to royally take down services, being able to audit and go back to the previous good known state is gold
marcosscriven 7mo ago
I keep going in circles with thinking about trying NixOS. I see an article like this about how great it is, think I might try it, then go down a rabbit hole of all the horror stories, and then give up before starting.
iamcalledrob 7mo ago
I still really wish there was a NixOS, but without the quirky filesystem/linking setup. Declarative, but not trying to solve for the "I want 5 versions of python at the same time" problem. The weird NixOS filesystem is where 90% of my Nix issues come from. And I don't feel like I benefit from it much, if at all. Bonus points if this fictional solution doesn't use a fancy new programming language. Something like HOCON would be perfect. I just want the same OS, packages and config on all my machines without allowing long-term drift. And I want the time I spend tweaking my Linux setup to be an investment, not a waste of time that gets thrown away when I upgrade. I know I could use home-manager or similar for my user-level config, but that's not enough. I've been experimenting with the immutable fedora-bootc images and podman+Containerfiles, which works pretty well for this. But there's no "nixos-rebuild switch" command, so changes require a reboot. Fine for daily use, but very painful when experimenting. I did discover its possible to use the older dnf4 --transient flag to temporarily install packages, which is helpful. I guess its a trade-off between easy tinkering (Nix) but frustrating filesystem vs fussy tinkering (bootc) but standard linux filesystem once booted.
CafeRacer 6mo ago
Nix is a really good good good approach to manage packages. I've configured an entire asahi setup with for my m2 and can't be happier. It's not without it's quirks and nixlang itself is a bit cumbersome to express what you want. However, AI is a great fit to write flakes. You can easily understand the generated code and it gives a power to "review" the changes before applying them. And while nixos is amazing, I think nixpkgs are a bit overhyped; I've encountered many packages that are abandoned and outdated. I can share my configs if anyone is interested.
- jkl5xx 6mo ago
  Definitely interested! I've reinstalled Fedora Asahi Remix several times on my old M1 after fiddling my way into a broken state. NixOS sounds like a tinkerer's dream but getting started is a bit intimidating.
jmmv 6mo ago
I started playing with NixOS recently in a VM and... while I don't have much experience with it yet, it feels _great_ for the many reasons described in the article. I really like configuring a file and knowing that the rest of the system aligns to whatever that file says: no more, no less. The language is "interesting" and I haven't had to learn it in depth yet. Claude and Codex really make it easier to get started with Nix's weirdness -- but that's unfortunate because I feel I'm not going to learn the "real thing" otherwise. And this difficulty makes me curious about Guix though because, even though I'm not LISP expert either, at least I can read it. Anyway. I'm just shy to "dig deeper" on NixOS because my servers are FreeBSD and I'm already feeling the temptation to swap them with NixOS, which would feel like a betrayal to these long-lived installations... ;-P
- tombert 6mo ago
  I feel like if you want to learn Nix with some hand-holding, resist the urge to use Claude Code or Codex, but instead just use the chatbot in the browser or something. Ask it questions, explicitly copy and paste in errors as they come up, and manually copy and paste out the generated stuff. I found that this gives a good compromise of being able to learn Nix relatively well, but still having a "tutor" to help when things get tricky. I'm reasonably ok at Nix now, and can generally figure out what I need to do without AI assistance, but I'm glad I had ChatGPT when I was getting started with it.
fastonosql 6mo ago
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brungarc 6mo ago
I love NixOS and nix-darwing too. Specially now that I can use it without having to learn a bunch of stuff before even getting started. My coding agent is great at it.
fridder 6mo ago
Nix + FreeBSD would be interesting
pouetpouetpoue 6mo ago
dont know. you can create a config package with most distribution. i do config packages for debian. ai can help you on it. you tag it as config-smthg. you save it . you can create a config with a possible rollback organically by just uninstalling it or installing version-x. with this you get atomic changes.
jmartens 6mo ago
This comment thread highlights an issue that Nix has...some people love it personally, some love it professionally. Some are software engineers, others are hackers. Most of the comments here seem to be from people using NixOS on a laptop. NixOS as a production OS in the cloud or on a robot is a game changer.

Why I love NixOS

446 points by birkey 7mo ago

soumyaskartha 7mo ago

Most people who try Nix either quit in the first week or never go back to anything else. There is no in between.

Daunk 7mo ago
What would the in between be?
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  Gobolinux comes to mind. If you don't mind a very limited set of software, the way tinycorelinux is setup can also allow multiple different tcz installed These two Linux distros essentially allow two different versions of same software/libraries (glibc/python whatever) installed (Gobolinux explicitly states that whereas I find it to be an unintended but elegant consequence for tinycorelinux but I recommend taking a look at Gobolinux)
- Diti 7mo ago
  Using a regular mutable system and Nix on top using Home Manager for example.
- jwiz 7mo ago
  Use it for a month or two and decide it's not for you. That is in between "use it for very short period of time" and "use it forever"
- DanielVZ 7mo ago
  Using it for a year or so and then try another OS is my guess
troad 7mo ago
This is a simple reflection of the fact that Nix has a steep learning curve. People who persist generally have deep-enough interest or a compelling-enough use case to power through. I feel like it's more of an indictment than praise; it implies Nix is relatively inaccessible to interested but time-constrained dabblers, which puts a hard cap on Nix's ability to outgrow its niche.
hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]
- JamesSwift 6mo ago
  Yes, for me it was 2 or 3 rounds of "its just not clicking" before it did and then there was no looking back. Ive heard the same anecdote from lots of others as well.
dizhn 7mo ago
There is. Give it a go every few years and decide either Nix is not ready or I am not ready for it.
ux266478 6mo ago
I'm the inbetween. I stuck with it for a couple of months, but ended up dropping it. It's just too slow and incurs a massive complexity penalty that I'm not happy about. I'd rather just deal with tarball rootfses and union mounts if I want an immutable system (and overwhelmingly I do not.) The reproducible builds are nice and all, but I'm not in a position to really take advantage of it. I'm sure Nix is killer for a modern sysadmin. I'd much prefer just Plan 9. WORM filesystem and first-class namespaces.

loremm 7mo ago

This is niche and HN is full of these back and forth comments. One thing which a particular type of crowd will appreciate is being able to apply simple patches to constantly-up-to-date packages. For an example, I love atuin but it, by default, skips commands starting with space. Currently it's not configurable and while I wait for time to submit a PR or for the issue to be resolved, make a single line `patch` which just removes the part of the `if` statement which checks if it starts with space. So easy, took 5 minutes (also had to comment out 1 test). And now on home-manager debian or nixos server, I get up to date atuin with that one patch. It downloads rust, etc, compiles, and then that's garbage collected away

0x457 7mo ago
Same but with kernel. What lead me to nixos: company gave me a laptop with iGPU that wasn't supported by any released linux kernel. There were patches waiting to be merged, with nixOS making an installer image that supports my machine was simple.
kiliankoe 7mo ago
I'm just curious what your motivation for the patch is, because I too use atuin and see the space-prefix as a feature. It's been around for a while (longer than atuin) to keep certain commands out of my history on purpose, like when running some one-off command with credentials as an arg. Other than that I very much agree, patching stuff is wonderful in nix-land! Especially when things in nixpkgs-unstable break.

nehalem 7mo ago

Although I’ve never committed to using nix system-wide, I do enjoy nix-based using https://devenv.sh/ https://devenv.sh/ for the very reasons described in the article. It’s much easier than local containers for development.

catlover76 7mo ago
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MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
Can you help me understand why devenv is needed instead of a shell like this/what is gained? { pkgs }: pkgs.mkShell { nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ # build tools cmake ninja gnumake pkg-config ]; buildInputs = with pkgs; [ # java jdk8 # compilers gcc clang llvmPackages.libcxx # libraries capstone icu openssl_3 libusb1 libftdi zlib # scripting (python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ requests pyelftools ])) ]; # capstone headers are in include/capstone/ but blutter expects include/ shellHook = '' export CPATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPATH" export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH="${pkgs.capstone}/include/capstone:$CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH" ''; }
- nehalem 7mo ago
  To be honest, I don’t know. I just enjoy the simplicity of devenv. It’s the right amount of user friendly.
- fermuch 7mo ago
  devenv also has tasks/services. For example you need to start redis, then your db, then seed it, and only then start the server. All of that could be aliases, yeah, but if you define them as aliases you can have them all up with `devenv up`. It even supports dependencies between tasks ("only run the db after migrations ran")
- shakow 7mo ago

bikelang 7mo ago

I don’t any experience with Nix - but how does it handle software which runs its own updating processes outside the package manager? Specifically thinking about software like Discord, Slack, Docker Desktop, Jetbrains Toolbox, etc. Is the Nix-ism to just reject using such software?

uncletaco 7mo ago
No there’s a nerd who will obsessively submit the latest version of any popular software that does that to nixpkgs. Or suggest you use the flatpak.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
  Except if you go look at nixpkgs half of the technologies grandparent listed are either missing entirely or in a hilariously broken state. The true answer is that there is just some software that is antithetical to the philosophy of nix. It’s not necessarily nix’s fault that this is the case, but their purism towards resisting opaque binary blobs going into the store reflects on the actual state of what’s available in nix. You need some impure, nonreproducible way of managing that software. So on nix Darwin I let these opaque binary blobs manage themselves via homebrew and use nix for every other case possible
- zamalek 7mo ago
  I generally use flatpak for things that are important to keep extremely updated, e.g. my browser for vulnerability reasons.
MuffinFlavored 7mo ago
really good question. right now I have bought into the Nix koolaid a bit. I have NixOS Linux machines and then nix-darwin on my Mac. I use Nix to install Brew and then Brew to manage casks for things like Chrome what I'm sure updates itself. So the "flake.lock" probably isn't super accurate for the apps you described.
whytevuhuni 7mo ago
That's not much different than other distros, because the way auto-update usually works, is it can't use root permissions or the system package manager (in any distro), so it has to install the newer version in $HOME. Once the update is installed, the system package becomes a trampoline to that. I tried Discord, and this one seems to download some updates on first run, but the version sticks to the one from the system (0.0.127, latest is 0.0.129). So I assume it just doesn't update, or it tries to and fails.

fareesh 7mo ago

doesn't it use up a lot of disk space compared to other distros because of the way everything is set up?

Valodim 7mo ago
Yes. But disk space isn't exactly the most valuable resource you have as a developer/power user
bspammer 7mo ago
Yep disk space and learning curve are the two major downsides to Nix. The former has never been a problem for me in practice, just run garbage collection once a month. The latter was a big problem, but is now mitigated for most people by LLMs.
- Pay08 7mo ago
  Disk space is not an issue as long as you don't try to install the entirety of Texlive.
moonlion_eth 7mo ago
actually once I garbage collect, nixos actually uses up less disk space for me than other distros
exitb 7mo ago
Yes, however the space is not „used up” in a classic sense. It’s a cache, so you can give up some of it and reclaim your space. Fresh after a full cleanup it won’t take much more than a regular distro.
dandanua 7mo ago
Use nix.optimise.automatic = true in the config and perform nix-collect-garbage if necessary. With this it doesn't take much.
CafeRacer 6mo ago
Yes, but you can also reclaim your space. I've configured nix to only store two latest revisions and have a ./switch.sh file that automatically clears everything up after applying nix. I had issues when giving boot partition only 512mb, so I'd recommend going with 1G.

erichocean 7mo ago

What I'd like to see is Omarchy implemented via the Nix package manager. (Seems like a good project for AI, actually.)

Cyph0n 7mo ago
Already exists, although I don’t know how well maintained it is: https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix https://github.com/henrysipp/omarchy-nix Personally, I don’t see the need for this with NixOS. Setting aside the fact that Omarchy is way too opinionated (Basecamp installed by default?), NixOS is already quite composable, so you can easily build a well-formed experience out of isolated NixOS modules.
rounce 7mo ago
Why? Most people’s system configurations are publicly accessible on GitHub. Stuff like Omarchy only makes sense* when the system must be configured imperatively and there is a cost to trying things (accumulation of application residue). When you build your system declaratively you can just copy the bits you like from other people’s configs, or even just run their config as-is. * IMO Omarchy doesn’t make sense anyway, far too much opinion and too little utility. It’s not a distro it’s some guy’s overly promoted pile of crufty scripts and dotfiles.
CafeRacer 6mo ago
You can point AI to omarchy repo and have it generate a plan and them implement step by step. My entire config is almost "omarchy", at least visually with hyprland and some other packages.

quchen 7mo ago

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn! I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age yet though, and trying out NixOS in a VM is not only easy, it is practical – in the sense that when you’re happy, you can simply boot that same config/OS anywhere else by just installing that config. And I’ll never forget that one time where I completely borked my everything in the VM, did a kernel rollback with like 3 command line args and a reboot, and the OS was, well, rolled back. As I said, almost platonic. What I can recommend is using nix-the-package-manager. Whenever I need the newest version of something, `nix-env -i <whatever>` and it’s there and works. If it doesn’t, roll back. If I need a different version, that’s on nixpkgs as well, with the same negligible amount of friction.

Pay08 7mo ago
Obligatory Guix plug. I've found it way easier to understand, but it has teething issues that NixOS doesn't (latest for me was a few problems with DMs). And according to an acquaintance of mine, it works reasonably well with an LLM.
colordrops 7mo ago
Flakes are de facto standard at this point. Expressions are easy once you get used to them - in fact the Nix language grows on many of us, including myself, once you internalize it. Using AI to generate Nix config is a superpower. Because the entire system is declared in a single set of config, you can basically spell cast any system you want. I one-shotted a Linux distro with custom branding for boot, installation screen, and login screen, and VPN and dev tools installed and configured by default, at a fortune 500 tech company.
MarsIronPI 7mo ago
I'm not sure if I live in some kind of parallel world, because I never had any problems grokking Nix or NixOS. I started with this book[0] and haven't ever really been confused. [0]: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world

epolanski 7mo ago

What I like most about nixos is that you can have deterministically cached packages you don't need to rebuild every time in your ci. It's also simple to setup dev environments with nix.

bikelang 7mo ago
Nix in CI seems like a really excellent match. I don’t care much about the ATproto space - but Tangled has built their CI system on Nix and I find that really compelling. CI Caching is just awful with GitHub actions - so it made me disappointed that Forgejo went that route.
- Norfair 7mo ago
  This is exactly why I made https://nix-ci.com/ https://nix-ci.com/ And it supports Forgejo, GitHub, and GitLab.
- shae 7mo ago
  I use https://garnix.io/ https://garnix.io/ for all my Nix CI, works great.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

BoredPositron 7mo ago

The problem I have with nix is that I just don't need another hobby. Keeping everything up to date in an ever changing environment like an os just looks like chore. I install my system and image it every week and keep maybe the initial and a monthly snapshot. Why would nix be better in my case? Maybe I am missing something essential but I also don't bork my system that often tbh.

qiine 7mo ago
nixos updates tend to be a lot less eventful than others distro, in fact the way it largely prevent system borking when updating, is spiritually freeing.
hombre_fatal 7mo ago
Imo it's the opposite. Since the system is defined in config files, an AI agent can look at live system state/errors vs. the config file and do all the work of figuring out the issue. Also, using higher level modules like home manager makes things more declarative and less fiddly since someone else is maintaining the lower level. Maybe nix is a downgrade for what you do. But I loved nix so much that I also migrated to nix on macOS (nix-darwin). No more homebrew.
overtone1000 7mo ago
For me, it's the difference between taking your medicine a bit at a time on your own schedule or taking it all at once as an unwelcome surprise. Sure, setting up file system mounts or adding udev entries is easier to do once in Ubuntu than in NixOS, but I only need to do it the one time with NixOS. Thereafter, the config serves as both documentation and backup. For a hobby self hoster like me who occasionally shoots himself in the foot and has to rebuild a system, it is ideal. I don't know if it really saves me time, but I do know it saves my sanity. I am no nix whiz, but it's the only OS I run outside of containers. Anything I can't easily get with my nix config I shove into a container, run it as a quadlet, and call it good.
Pay08 7mo ago
The configuration system is way more stable than it seems. You write it once and then pretty much never touch it again.

dangirsh 7mo ago

My love for NixOS really became clear when I realized I never have to write Nix again by hand. A WIP NixOS config for working with agents: https://github.com/dangirsh/tsurf https://github.com/dangirsh/tsurf

redrove 7mo ago
Same. I have a full homelab and multiple macs, can’t say I’ve written a line of real Nix code by hand. If you’re itching to try Nix, now is the time.
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  Same. Can't imagine going back to the status quo where my system is the accumulation of terminal commands over time instead of a config file.
  - redrove 7mo ago
    Not to mention the non-idempotent python + bash + ssh hell of Ansible, or awful DSLs such as Salt, Puppet, Chef, etc.

edent 7mo ago

I'd love NixOS more if they had any decent documentation. Everything seems scattered around a dozen forums, a hundred old blog posts, and a thousand issues of "this work on my machine (3 releases ago)".

exe34 7mo ago
ChatGPT is very good at pulling it together to give you working code. Not on the first try, but on the third try it usually works.
- moonlion_eth 7mo ago
  my entire system is configured using a flake i built with coding agent and skills to tell it how to configure things in nixos heh
- qiine 7mo ago
  Pasting the generally horrible error messages is also quite effective!
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    Pasting? Give Claude/codex the ability to go fix it itself and have it deal with it directly.
    - exe34 7mo ago
      no thank you, there are things I do not want Claude to have rwx on. like my entire f*cking system. I run llms in a docker container with just the folder I'm working in.
      - CyberShadow 7mo ago
        If you grant access to the Nix daemon socket but not writing outside the current directory, that's an effective sandbox. It allows evaluating derivations but not actually installing them.

moonlion_eth 7mo ago

nixos is love. nixos is life. once you grok it, there's no going back. see you on the other side.

voigtk 7mo ago

I love Nixos. Having a deterministic system is such a great way to know what your system is capable of. The only thing that bothers me is that when I rebuild my system after updating the lock file, if a package is broken the whole upgrade become impossible.

DHolzer 7mo ago

I switched over to Nix about a year ago. I was a Windows user before that for 30 years and tried Linux a couple of times, but it never stuck. Now I know I will never touch Windows again. With NixOS I've finally found a system that actually works for me — and the full OS configuration is in a repo. My god, I love it so much. Sometimes I even prefer nix-shells over uv for quick one-off Python scripts. I cannot sufficiently convey how absolutely barbaric everything else feels in comparison. Not having Nix would be like having to work on code without Git — absolutely unacceptable. And it really isn't that much work — you do it once. The next time you set up a new system, without Nix, you'll have to do the full configuration all over again.

stephen_cagle 7mo ago
Have you heard of any good projects for running isolated containers in NixOS that are cheaply derived from your own NixOS config? Because that is what I want. I want a computer where I can basically install every non stock app in its own little world, where it thinks "huh, that is interesting, I seem to be the only app installed on this system". Basically, I want to be able to run completely unverified code off of the internet on my local machine, and know that the worst thing it can possibly due is trash its own container. I feel like NixOS, is one path toward getting to that future.
- woleium 7mo ago
  sounds like you want qubes os https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/
- bpavuk 7mo ago
  depends whether you consider rootless Docker "cheap". I tried running ZeroClaw in a Nix-derived Docker (spoiler - it was a bad idea to use ZeroClaw at all since the harness is very buggy) and there is still a potential for container escape zero-days, but that's the best I've found. also, Nix's own containerization is not as hermetic as Docker; they warn about that in docs
- gallexme 7mo ago
  If containers are safe enough for ur use case then just use nixos containers they just a few more lines to setup in a regular nixos config If it isn't enough there's microvm.nix which is pretty much the same in difficulty /complexity, but runs inside a very slim and lightweight VM with stronger isolation than a container

schindlabua 7mo ago

After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way. It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.

tombert 7mo ago
Yeah, I've been using Unixey stuff for almost twenty years now (most of it Linux, and fell for the siren song of macOS for about four of them). I liked Arch and Ubuntu and Mint and OpenSUSE well enough when I used them first, but once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything. Being able to temporarily install things with nix-shell is game changing, and being able to trivially see what's actually installed on my computer by quickly looking at my configuration.nix is so nice. "Uninstalling" things boils down to "remove from configuration.nix and rebuild". The automatic snapshots upon each build allows me to be a lot "braver" when playing with configurations than I was with Arch. I was always afraid to mess with video card or wifi drivers, because if I screwed something up and if I didn't know how to get back to where I was, I might be stuck reinstalling to get back to a happy state. This didn't happen that often but often enough to have made me a bit weary about futzing with boot parameters or kernel modules. Because of the automatic snapshots with NixOS, it's much easier (and more fun) to poke with the lower level stuff, because if I do break something in a way that I don't know how to fix, the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. For example, with my current laptop, there was a weird quirk with my USB devices having to "wake up" after not being used for more than thirty seconds, meaning that I might start typing and the first three or four words wouldn't go through. After some digging, I found out that the solution is to add "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" to the kernel params. I did that and it worked. If I had still been running Arch or Ubuntu, I probably would have just learned to put up with it, because I would have been afraid to edit kernel parameters because of the risk of breaking things in a way that I don't know how to fix. I love NixOS. I have no desire to leave, or at least I have no desire to abandon the model. I've considered changing to GNU Guix System since I like Lisp more than I like the Nix language, but those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.

atcol 7mo ago

NixOS is great. Nix the language is just awful. I still use it for my Dev laptop and for Home Manager on all my devices.

tombert 7mo ago
You know, I'm not going to say I'm enamored with the language, but I think the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in because I really don't hate the language so much anymore. I mean, I'm only ever using it for configurations, and I think I'd still prefer writing Nix than YAML. I probably wouldn't like writing a full "program" with Nix, but I don't think anyone does that?
- kgwxd 7mo ago
  Sounds like every programming language on the planet. Just skip the "i'm unfamiliar with it, so i hate it" phase, and everything will be fine. People spend more time repeating that simple POV, using thousands of varying words, than is healthy. Just shut up, and do the work. And if you're not going to put in the work, just shut up, and let everyone else get to work.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I mean I don't know that I agree with that completely. Languages can still be actively awful even if you do learn them. I have written a lot of PHP. In order to learn it I bought several books, I've done a dozen or so projects with it at various jobs, I've written both trivial and non-trivial things, and I have come to the conclusion that PHP is an actively terrible language [1]. It's inconsistent and hard to write in any kind of maintainable way with an ugly syntax and generally-crappy performance for any kind of logic beyond CRUD. [1] At least version 5, which is the last version I've used. I've heard 7 is better but I'll never know because I swore an oath in blood that I would not do PHP again for less than a million dollars a year.
choward 6mo ago
There are so many people complaining about the Nix language while offering zero constructive criticism. I was a little skeptical about them using a custom language at first. But then as I used it more it grew on me and I understand why it is the way it is. People just seem to want to complain because it doesn't look like any of their favorite languages and they aren't familiar with functional languages. At this point, I can't imagine using any other language in place of Nix. The code would have so much noise and be much harder to read.

vluft 7mo ago

nix & nixos are by far the worst way to manage system configuration, except for any other way that's been tried. imagine if there was something with declarative system configuration _not_ written in an insane undebuggable recursive nightmare of a language/stdlib? oh well, I'll keep using it, because what other options are there?

gausswho 7mo ago
guix would like a word
- rowanG077 7mo ago
  I mean it's pretty wild to take s-expressions and not call them extremely terrible to read. The nix language sucks really badly, but I gladly take it over writing S-expressions.
  - Pay08 7mo ago
    It reads almost the exact same as any functional C-style language. Not to mention that specifically for Guix, you're going to be writing the (name value) form for 99% of it.
    - rowanG077 7mo ago
      I don't agree at all. Just look at these derivations: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/packages/electronics.scm https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/package... I counted and you regularly see this: "))))))))))" at the end. This is not a language that is optimizing for being written by humans.
      - Pay08 7mo ago
        That link isn't working for me (something about AI detection), but as a point of accuracy, those aren't derivations, they're simple source files. Derivations are generated out of them. As for the closing braces, would it be better if you had a newline between each?

shevy-java 7mo ago

NixOS kind of extends the idea of reproducible builds. Any snapshot could be a guarantee that things just work. This can also be extended onto the user base - if one user has solved a problem, it should be solved for all of them. So we can jump from guarantee to guarantee here. My only gripe with NixOS is Nix. I think that this is also the biggest drawback of NixOS. I don't have an alternative; but perhaps it may be better to allow any format to be used, rather than force nix onto everyone. Another issue is that, for a reason I don't quite understand, a few years ago NixOS' quality appears to have gone down, e. g. nobody cares about documentation anymore. This is probably not a huge obstacle per se, but I did not feel I should invest that much into nix (which I dislike) when the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Ironically this also means that the whole idea behind NixOS, falls flat, if the documentation is poor. They really should make the same guarantees for their documentation, just as they do for the software ecosystem too. Nobody cares about documentation anymore though - AI has won. Just try finding high quality documentation via google search; it is slop world now.

ocimbote 7mo ago

I tried NixOS and failed miserably. I've pointed at to the Fedora Atomic distros, which are also immutable, and apparently incomparably easier to setup. I'm tempted to give it a shot, with the extra bonus that I've never dabbed with a fedora-based distro.

ydj 7mo ago
I tried fedora silverblue for a while, but the way it works is that it builds a new root fs image whenever you change the installed packages, this makes system package changes take comparatively long vs a traditional os. They suggest installing most apps via flatpak, which is okay as long as you can deal with flatpak idiosyncrasies. I also tried fedora coreos for a vm + container host, but found the recommended method to configure the system with ignition files and one shot systemd units to be too involved for making a one off system, and it’s probably better for a cloud deployment with many identical nodes.
- Pay08 7mo ago
  In all fairness, Nix is similarly slow.
et1337 7mo ago
I’ve been driving Bluefin DX for a year or two. On the plus side, it works absolutely flawlessly. This is the longest I’ve ever run a Linux distro without a Nvidia driver update causing the whole thing to explode. It truly is the year of Linux on the desktop. But I can’t say I recommend it for dev work. It wants you to do everything inside devcontainers, which I like in theory but in practice come with so many annoyances. It wants you to install Flatpaks but Flathub is pretty sparse. I ended up downloading raw Linux binaries into my home directory (which actually works surprisingly well. Maybe this is the future, hah) I think next time I’ll just go with vanilla Fedora.

sidkshatriya 7mo ago

[From the article "Why I love NixOS"] > There is also community-maintained support for FreeBSD, though I have not used it personally I have tried to use the nix package manager on FreeBSD recently. I tried doing some basic things without success. Seems quite broken and unusable, which is a pity because nix on macOS seems decent. FreeBSD is much closer to Linux so there is no technical reason why nix can't be a success on FreeBSD. nix on FreeBSD just needs more contributors to fix bugs and make popular packages work ! I wonder if it will ever happen. FreeBSD is niche and nix is somewhat niche (still). It's a double niche problem !

copirate 7mo ago

One thing I love about NixOS is how easy it is to run packages from different sources. For example, I needed an old package that's been removed from nixpkgs several years ago. To run it I just had to add an old release of nixpkgs as input to my flake.nix and add the package from this input. It pulls all its dependencies from that old release and there's zero conflict with the other packages.

sirtimbly 7mo ago

All the fun of Terraform with none of the profitability.

rgoulter 7mo ago
For a single machine? Yeah, NixOS' cost surely outweighs the benefits if you're not familiar with Nix. Using Nix for per-project development dependencies is quite good. It's nice to be able to return to a project & not have to fuss over which tools/libraries need to be installed.

alembic_fumes 7mo ago

The author almost touches on the one more topic that I adore about Nix, but ends up just so missing it: NixOS is absolutely incredible for its ability to be configured through AI tooling. And I don't mean that it's better than other operating systems, I mean that it's the only game in town. I've been using Nix, both the package manager and the operating system, for years by now. I agree with all of the author's points, it really does deliver, the declarative nature is superb, and there's this constant sense of "hey my stuff is not breaking by itself" when working on it. And it's that declarative, rollback-able, file-based foundation, that makes it the perfect operating system for telling a coding agent to go to town on. Would I trust Claude to switch my audio stack from Pulseaudio to Pipewire on Ubuntu? Would I trust Codex to install Hyprland on Fedora so I can test out the session? No, in fact I would not trust any agent to do any of those things on any other operating system. But I would trust even goddamn Grok to do that on NixOS, because I can 1) audit the changes before anything is done, and 2) rollback, rollforward, roll-whatever-the-way-I-want-even-on-the-floor-if-I-want-to because of the years of built up confidence proving that IT JUST WORKS. I concede that this is turning into an unhinged loveletter to Nix, but really, it's the only operating system that lets one operate with this level of confidence. And I know most people don't care about that, since most people don't usually bother to tweak their OSes or switch out window managers, but as someone that does that, I'm never going back to mutable distros. This security is my table-stakes now, and the others aren't willing to pay up. So for the developers out there on the lookout for their "Year of the Linux Desktop 2026" -distribution, if you're already using AI assistants, give NixOS a try. Maybe start with this in an empty Git repository: "Hey Claude, I wanna try NixOS. Make me a Flake-based starter config using Gnome that I can demo in a virtual machine. If nix isn't yet installed, install it via determinate-systems installer. Include a "vm" target in the flake for building the image, and a small bash script that builds and launches the VM using whatever virtualization is available on my platform."

sshine 7mo ago
As a NixOS user for 3 years, and a Claude user for 1+ year, I agree with you that it's an ideal fit. I've been very happy with, for example, how Claude can configure GNOME via dconf settings: tweaking those settings declaratively requires cross-domain knowledge and knowing where to dig. But Claude just knows. But trying to set up an environment for one of those perpetually running AIs, and asking it to refactor its own configuration according to some of the high-level abstractions like dendritic flake-parts, and so on, it's just clueless and will improvise without success. What makes Nix hard for humans also makes Nix hard for AIs: Untyped lambdas that get resolved in some implied out-of-file context means you have to know if you're looking at a NixOS module, a home-manager module, a nix-darwin module, a flake-parts module, and so on. And those modules may make assumptions about what's imported in the parent scope. So I feel like you need to supply a rather extensive context for your project that details how you want things structured, because the ecosystem is quite fragmented, people don't fully agree on what good patterns are, and so the AI can't know what the good patterns are. Just to be absolutely clear: I think that supplying an extensive context is absolutely worth it, and I'm having great joy and success building better Nix-based project templates, Nix-based deployment templates, etc. The amount of stable, well-made projects made by other Nix users is just amazing.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

dewey 7mo ago

I've recently switched to nix as a way to encode my environment across my server and work / private devices a bit more than just having some Brewfiles. I know it's not worth it for the computer switch every few years but having a somewhat opinionated place to centralize my config is worth it over regular dot files. My first impression after a week of using: - I really dislike the complexity of terraform, and this is very similar - The UX is pretty bad, the commands and flags are hard to memorize and you basically need a shell alias for any regular commands to clean them up - The commands you run regularly like applying your nix config to the system after adding some new packages or config options look like: "nix run nix-darwin -- switch --flake /Users/philipp/repos/github.com/dewey/nix#private"". The output is a mix between expected warnings and way to verbose for something that should essentially be the equivalent of "brew update / brew upgrade". I'll stick with it as I didn't find anything better and LLMs are great for building up the config over time, but there's definitely room for some improvements.

rounce 7mo ago
Add `nix-darwin` to your path (it probably already is on it) and run it while in the directory of the flake: "nix-darwin switch --flake .#private"
the_real_cher 6mo ago
I just make my terminal history infinite and ctrl+r "flake".
rkomorn 6mo ago
I really want to like NixOS (and I mostly do) but the weirdness of the split between NixOS and HomeManager (and the fact that without HomeManager, you need another solution to manage your user-level configs) made it come up a bit short for me.

sdsd 7mo ago

I feel the same way about Guix with nonguix channel enabled. NixOS is awesome but I prefer Guile to Nix's language and I enjoy the docs more. But definitely sister OSes.

globular-toast 7mo ago
There's nowhere near enough love for Guix. I don't understand it. It has far better foundations. I would never invest time into some "config language". Using a real programming language has huge benefits, and it's a good one (Scheme).
- SirHumphrey 7mo ago
  It also has very slow rebuild times.

devnotes77 7mo ago

[dead]

gradstudent 7mo ago

I tried NixOS a few months ago, when I had to choose a new OS for my laptop. On the one hand, it's great, as so many others here and TFA have attested. Declaratively specifying your system configuration and using snapshots to keep track of everything is a complete game-changer. Similarly great is the absolutely huge universe of installable packages. The coverage here is so much better than what's on offer from Ubuntu or Fedora. On the other hand, the current implementation is still a bit of a shit-show. First, there's nix-the-OS and nix-the-package-manager which is pretty confusing. Effectively it means you manage your OS with one declarative system and your local/home config with another. Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood, that seem to offer a different modality altogether. Second, installing packages is nice, but also confusing. Do you install a package or a service? Often both are available and the difference is not always clear. Eventually I learned to choose a service whenever one was available. In either case, the tendency of package maintainers is to install the smallest possible version of whatever you asked for. For example, I wanted KDE but what I got was a bare minimum version with plenty of missing apps and functionality that could only be fixed by adding extra components, one at a time, after debugging whatever was currently breaking. I appreciated that services and packages can be configured in the configuration file. But the options exposed are usually a partial set of what's available -- without extending the installations scripts yourself. So now my "declarative" config is a mix of what's in my nixOS config file and what's in my manually edited /etc files. Third, the documentation, mentioned by others, is a mess. There's all kinds of information about old and new versions. The interfaces of the command-line tools seem to have changed between the 25.05 stable that I chose and the then-upcoming 25.11, which made following-along harder than it needed to be. I eventually gave up because I needed a working machine and not a new hobby. I was left with the impression that NixOS might be a good choice for system admins, but perhaps not yet ready for desktop Linux users.

zamalek 7mo ago
I can completely understand how you were driven away. If you ever want to give it a go again: > there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood Nix never clicked for me until I started using flakes. There's a lot of internal drama surrounding them that honestly childish; that's why they are marked as experimental and not the official recommendation. You are going to have a worse time with Nix if you go with the official recommendation, flakes are significantly more intuitive. The Determinate Systems installer enables them by default, and whatever documentation they have is on the happier path (except for FlakeHub, I haven't figured that one out yet). On the most fundamental level, flakes allow you to take /etc/nixos/nixos.nix (or whatever, it has been forever) out of /etc and into a git repository. Old-style nix may be able to do that, but I discovered flakes before trying. I did previously attempt to use git on /etc/nix, but git was falling to pieces with bizarre ownership problems. What this means is that I could install and completely configure a machine, once booted into a nix iso, by running: nixos-install --flake https://github.com/.../repo.git https://github.com/.../repo.git. I manage all of my system config out of /home/$user/$clone As for /home there is home-manager and, again, you are not steered towards it (the tutorial pushes you towards nix profiles/nix-env instead). Home-manager will do for your home directory what the system config does for your system, and has many program modules. You can even declare home-level systemd units and whatnot. > manually edited /etc files. You can use environment.etc for these files[1]. systemd.tmpfiles can be used for things outside of etc. Home-manager has the equivalent for .config, .local, .cache. [2]. [1]: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=environment.etc&show=environment.etc https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&query=envi... [2]: https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/?query=xdg.configFile&release=release-25.11 https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/?query=xdg.configF...

zamalek 7mo ago

> services.desktopManager.gnome.extraGSettingsOverrides = You can set dconf settings more declaratively: https://tangled.org/jonathan.dickinson.id/nix/blob/7c895ada8889f05cf440cd527fb7d2af2f6571ff/home/common/gnome.nix https://tangled.org/jonathan.dickinson.id/nix/blob/7c895ada8...

Havoc 7mo ago

> I can specify the whole OS including the packages I need and the configuration in one declarative setup. That one place aspect matters to me more than it might sound at first. It took me less than a day of experimenting with it to learn that it is one place only in theory. The second you start googling „how do I install xyz“ you discover there are also flakes. And others have some sort of convoluted git like method. And there is a package manager thing. And the direct config file editing like in this article. And a disposable temp install of some sort. And naturally software guides don’t give you instructions for all - they’re opinionated. Felt a lot like being on Debian and the software only comes in .rpm That really took the wind out of my sails because like OP I liked the basic config file part

Hasnep 7mo ago
I see your point about there being different ways to install a package, but I think I can clarify a bit by explaining how I use NixOS. If I'm running a package on a server that means I want to install it declaratively, so I find the name of the package in Nixpkgs and put it in my `configuration.nix` file. I'm using flakes, but the configuration is exactly the same, I just put the package in the output section of the flake. Any instructions you see to install a package just boils down to finding the name of the package. To me this is as simple as finding the name of a Debian package and running `apt` to install it. If you want additional features there are other optional ways to install packages, but these are features other distros don't offer, so if you just ignore them then there's no extra complexity compared to Debian for example.

chenzhekl 7mo ago

[dead]

bivlked 7mo ago

i've been tempted by NixOS for servers but keep going back to Debian. the reproducibility is amazing in theory, but when you need to debug a DKMS kernel module build at 2am on a VPS, having "just apt install" is worth a lot. maybe NixOS for dev workstations, Debian for production VPS is the right split.

rounce 7mo ago
The reproducibility is amazing in reality: you either just run the misbehaving server’s config in a VM (one command) or spin up a throwaway VPS and apply the config to that (one command and about 60s). One of the major benefits of reproducibility is not having to poke at production machines because that’s the one place you can manifest the issue, now you can reproduce the in-production issues in a safe environment and fix them there.
FinnKuhn 7mo ago
I think the most interesting use case I have seen so far was for computers that control industrial equipment where you want identical installs on potentially dozens of machines.

baalimago 7mo ago

"Loving" any OS is strange to me. It's just a tool. I don't love my kitchen knife, or car. Nor do I love my computer, or any application on it. Web3, Rust, NixOS. The holy trinity of cult-like appreciation. I do wonder what brings forth such fanaticism.

globular-toast 7mo ago
I love my kitchen knife and I love Emacs. More love is a good thing. Unless you're the kind of person who thinks not loving is better because you've got nothing to lose.
- baalimago 7mo ago
  To me, loving inanimate "trivial" things diminishes the value of love. I love my girlfriend and my pets. I like my kitchen knife and my car. To bunch up both into the same category confuses things into "which one do I love the most", some sort of spectrum of love. In the case of a fire, I'm sure you wouldn't prioritize your laptop with NixOS over your cat (let's imagine that the only backup is in the house that's on fire).
  - globular-toast 7mo ago
    No, you don't have to rank things, there's your mistake. Stop ranking things.
    - baalimago 7mo ago
      If I say "Girlfriend, I love equally to my operative system" I'm in for a world of trouble.
      - globular-toast 7mo ago
        Don't say it then. Nobody is forcing you to rank anything.
  - 7mo ago

abdullin 7mo ago

I liked NixOS pre-LLM era, since it allowed me to manage a couple of servers in a reproducible way. Ability to reboot back to a stable configuration felt like magic. Nowadays I love it, since I can let Codex manage the servers for me. “Here is the flake, here is nix module for the server, here is the project source code. Now change all of that so that wildcard certificates work and requests land through systemd socket on a proper go mux endpoint. Don’t come back until you verify it as working” 5 minutes later it came back.

russellclare 7mo ago

The versoining and ability roll back is game changing for SRE Agents and preventing their ability to royally take down services, being able to audit and go back to the previous good known state is gold

marcosscriven 7mo ago

I keep going in circles with thinking about trying NixOS. I see an article like this about how great it is, think I might try it, then go down a rabbit hole of all the horror stories, and then give up before starting.

iamcalledrob 7mo ago

I still really wish there was a NixOS, but without the quirky filesystem/linking setup. Declarative, but not trying to solve for the "I want 5 versions of python at the same time" problem. The weird NixOS filesystem is where 90% of my Nix issues come from. And I don't feel like I benefit from it much, if at all. Bonus points if this fictional solution doesn't use a fancy new programming language. Something like HOCON would be perfect. I just want the same OS, packages and config on all my machines without allowing long-term drift. And I want the time I spend tweaking my Linux setup to be an investment, not a waste of time that gets thrown away when I upgrade. I know I could use home-manager or similar for my user-level config, but that's not enough. I've been experimenting with the immutable fedora-bootc images and podman+Containerfiles, which works pretty well for this. But there's no "nixos-rebuild switch" command, so changes require a reboot. Fine for daily use, but very painful when experimenting. I did discover its possible to use the older dnf4 --transient flag to temporarily install packages, which is helpful. I guess its a trade-off between easy tinkering (Nix) but frustrating filesystem vs fussy tinkering (bootc) but standard linux filesystem once booted.

CafeRacer 6mo ago

Nix is a really good good good approach to manage packages. I've configured an entire asahi setup with for my m2 and can't be happier. It's not without it's quirks and nixlang itself is a bit cumbersome to express what you want. However, AI is a great fit to write flakes. You can easily understand the generated code and it gives a power to "review" the changes before applying them. And while nixos is amazing, I think nixpkgs are a bit overhyped; I've encountered many packages that are abandoned and outdated. I can share my configs if anyone is interested.

jkl5xx 6mo ago
Definitely interested! I've reinstalled Fedora Asahi Remix several times on my old M1 after fiddling my way into a broken state. NixOS sounds like a tinkerer's dream but getting started is a bit intimidating.

jmmv 6mo ago

I started playing with NixOS recently in a VM and... while I don't have much experience with it yet, it feels _great_ for the many reasons described in the article. I really like configuring a file and knowing that the rest of the system aligns to whatever that file says: no more, no less. The language is "interesting" and I haven't had to learn it in depth yet. Claude and Codex really make it easier to get started with Nix's weirdness -- but that's unfortunate because I feel I'm not going to learn the "real thing" otherwise. And this difficulty makes me curious about Guix though because, even though I'm not LISP expert either, at least I can read it. Anyway. I'm just shy to "dig deeper" on NixOS because my servers are FreeBSD and I'm already feeling the temptation to swap them with NixOS, which would feel like a betrayal to these long-lived installations... ;-P

tombert 6mo ago
I feel like if you want to learn Nix with some hand-holding, resist the urge to use Claude Code or Codex, but instead just use the chatbot in the browser or something. Ask it questions, explicitly copy and paste in errors as they come up, and manually copy and paste out the generated stuff. I found that this gives a good compromise of being able to learn Nix relatively well, but still having a "tutor" to help when things get tricky. I'm reasonably ok at Nix now, and can generally figure out what I need to do without AI assistance, but I'm glad I had ChatGPT when I was getting started with it.

fastonosql 6mo ago

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brungarc 6mo ago

I love NixOS and nix-darwing too. Specially now that I can use it without having to learn a bunch of stuff before even getting started. My coding agent is great at it.

fridder 6mo ago

Nix + FreeBSD would be interesting

pouetpouetpoue 6mo ago

dont know. you can create a config package with most distribution. i do config packages for debian. ai can help you on it. you tag it as config-smthg. you save it . you can create a config with a possible rollback organically by just uninstalling it or installing version-x. with this you get atomic changes.

jmartens 6mo ago

This comment thread highlights an issue that Nix has...some people love it personally, some love it professionally. Some are software engineers, others are hackers. Most of the comments here seem to be from people using NixOS on a laptop. NixOS as a production OS in the cloud or on a robot is a game changer.