NixOS: A peak at a MASSIVE rabbit hole!

After spending a week getting a nix configuration with flakes and modularity working, I've fully switched over, and I'm not looking back. It took a while but it worked out fantastic. Now that it's all working the way I like, I can be more productive and learn faster without concern of breaking my system. The ability to spin up a different machine, VM or container with all my stuff just working is a dream. Having a shell.nix file in the places that require seldom used configurations is better in so many ways compared to using docker for the same purpose.

Despite how little documentation there is and how frustrating it is to learn a new way for so many things on linux I've found nixos to be surprisingly comfy after the adjustment period. Package availability has been amazing and I think being able to tinker without fear leads me to learning more, faster. I'm still unsure if I'll find having to know another language for configuring worth it long term but nix looks promising as a more reproducible alternative to docker.

I tried using NixOS because I was hooked with its ideology, but then I realised I didnt need any of its features too much and doing anything was too much of a hassle to relearn. Tho I hope I can come back to it someday and try appreciating it again.

NixOS is unlike any other distro by nature and should only be installed by people who want a declarative, immutabile and replicable OS and who are willing to learn a new OS, or at least a fundamentally different approach to Linux. Declarativity, immutability, functional programming... these have major implications on how you use Linux and it's certainly not for everyone. It's not at all like switching from Ubuntu to Fedora or Arch.

I love how I can use NixOS like an absolute noob, going down the flatpak route and/or not use home-manager/flakes. So that I can slowly work my way to learning it. I have a desktop system at home and a laptop at the dorm. I think if I master Nix, it's going to be quite helpful. It's immutable and reversible, so pretty good for someone who loves tinkering like me

Nice video there! NixOS is so cool and useful, but I too feel that it is extreme in it's way of doing things and that there are more practical ways of doing system/package management with other less deal-breaking trade-offs.

The title should be "peek" (not tryna be rude, but it's not correct 😅). Cool video tho!

A just went away with arch + btrfs with system snapshots with the ability to rollback if something breaks after upgrade or system change.

There are a lot of inconveniences especially regarding the FHS non-compliance, but a slow package manager is not one of them in my experience. But maybe that's because I often "install" applications temporarily (e.g. with nix-shell -p spicetify-cli) which are cleaned up eventually after I leave the shell. This prevents cluttering up my system and only if I know I'll need a program regularly I add them to the system config or the user-specific config (via home-manager). Oh yea and I should mention the configuration option programs.nix-ld, which helps a lot with running random binaries which need linking.

You enjoy NixOS if you are interested in system tinkering and having a well defined and source-controllable configuration that you can deploy to various machines. If you just want an OS that "gets out of your way," you are most likely not the target audience.

Nice video!

OMG NIXOS MENTIONED

Aguante Nixos locooo

Great video and does cover some painpoints I think should be addressed. that being said, give nix another shot and don't avoid flakes. flakes solve a lot of problems with nix out of the box. I've been using nix about 6 months now and struggled at first with the channels paradigm. flakes pretty much entirely solves that now. mainly the imperitive issues with channels, but a lot under the hood was re-orchestrated to solve issues. for ex. in nix channels the built apps would be the correct versions when first installed but could change if you install them at different times. This means spicetify can find the files it needs because it knows the hash already. That said, spicetify should be building the theme at build time of spotify as the nix store is immutable. This can be done in the build steps for the derivation in a flake. Failing all of that, nothing is stopping you from doing imperitive things with other packaging like flatpak, spicetify would work simpy as that. declare spicetify in your nix config, install spotify with flatpak, spicetify-cli the flatpak.

bro got burned soo hard he switched to ubuntu

eww one space indenting 1:48

From playing around with it, it feels more suitable to things like headless homelab servers, VPS instances, hobby game hosting, etc. In that space it competes with Docker/K8S though. Nix vs Docker is obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the philosophies are similar -- and for my personal use cases, it seems easier to maintain a docker-compose file than a configuration.nix file.

The red flag for me is that Nix has its own programming language for the configuration file. I love the idea of a declarative OS, but I'd like to see something that prefers existing technologies rather than reinventing the wheel.

"I stopped using nixos" hm? "flakes which i avoided at all costs" ah that makes sense :D /s Trust me you'll eventually get sick of your stuff breaking on other distro's and maybe then you can come back :)

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