That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.

edit: I do feel norawibb's point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.

In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.

How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.

You might be interested in trying Gentoo, which is what I use. The package manager is definitely not fast, but it is very powerful. You get a lot of NixOS-like powers, but it integrates seamlessly into the unix eco-system without NixOS' overhead or its unorthodox approach that causes trouble sometimes. It also has first class support for compiler optimizations and global management of compile flags for packages.

So yeah, updates will not be fast at all, but the rest I think you'll enjoy.

I also haven't noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.

I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven't really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it's hard to say.

I'd definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.

( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )

I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don't care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies

Very reasonable and insightful write up. Thanks for sharing!

I know you haven't used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?

I'm asking because I'm using an arch based distro, but I've been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they're worth trying.

Could you also share the differences you perceived between Arch and Void ?

I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?

data intensive

I take it you weren't using flakes?

Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.

edit: this isn't arguing against him, i've heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.