It's insanely stable but you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software or making little tweaks. I played with it for hours the other day and I'm just too dumb to figure it out lol I think it's just a super stable highly customizable distro for power users and a lot of people like that. If you can get over the learning curve it's a pretty powerful and unique os
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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It's true that it can be a powerful distro but I've also heard from some users that the advanced-level documentation is lacking and only limited to forums and source code. I think maybe if the documentation was more thorough I would try nixos.
you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software
So, pretty much like any other distro
Most mainstream distro's can do all of that without a CLI.
Weird, every distro I've tried either has no management, or doesn't work. Just spins around loading. "Uninstalling" packages does nothing but remove them from the package manager.
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I have been using for years on servers. My lemmy instance is hosted on it.
Although for desktop I had too many issues back in 2019 so I ended up back to Arch Linux and then EndeavourOS
Would be fun to try again to use it on desktop
I think I will give it a try on a server first, I don’t have a playbook or script for a reproducible set up (yet), so I may as well use Nix to see if it’s worth the hype
Because it’s the latest Cool Nerd Thing™ like Arch before it, and Gentoo before that. Most of the people raving about it probably don’t have much use for its features.
Solution without a problem. A cool solution but yeah.
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All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.
I like using btrfs with Arch because of the snapshots. If an update breaks something I can just boot into a snapshot from grub keep using my PC and solve the problem later. It's very useful... yes... very... you should try it... come... try btrfs... it's warm and cozy... INSTALL IT!
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I'm using Void Linux and see no reason to move over to NixOS. The concept seems cool though.
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I've been looking at it after numerous times I update Fedora only to have some tool break that I use daily. Then I spend a chunk of the day getting Virtualbox working again so I can do my job (write code for websites).
I haven't made the jump, but it looks very interesting.
I've made the jump twice, and jumped back twice.
Conda and any other reproducible computing library that relies on LHS Linux filesystem just doesn't work on it (okay it does, but more as an obstacle)
I'm okay with having nix the package manager on my default arch system though, since it is incredibly useful for cross compiling, and it let's me modify my system however I want.
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Glancing over the website, I thought it's an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue. I could imagine that it might be cool to use with Ansible and stuff. But for an average user? I can't really see the advantages in respect to the work you have to put in.
It is an immutable distro, altough it isn't image-based like Fedora's rpm-ostree.
NixOS basically replaces Ansible because the Nix package manager achieves the same goals already (configuration, deployment, ...).
But I agree, the work necessary to put into this non-standard distro makes it hard to recommend for a casual user.
For those who like a video format, I found this introduction quite informative.
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I don't get the hype. I'm staying with Arch, as Nix seems to be mainly for developers.
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They don’t know about Debian stable.
I'm really not sure of where this would be anymore usefull than a simple bash script to install all packages you need since it doesn't do configs and that rollbacks are supported by some filesystems already. Also Having version specific dependencies is already a thing for flatpacks and such
Part of the purpose of NixOS is providing a means to build a reproducible environment that's easy to configure, migrate, and rollout. You can absolutely handle configuration of many different programs using either flakes or the native modules provided by nix. You can customize your entire system from firewall entries, to users and their shells, to the kernel itself and the kernel modules you'd want it to load, all in a single file or multiple files. If you want to try doing all those things in bash scripts, good luck and please share your experiences but don't expect it to be as easy as the Nix ecosystem.
so it does handle more than just conditional packages like the other zealots make it sound like
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I don’t know NixOS. My Linux machine runs Pop_OS and Manjaro.
What are the pros and cons of NixOS ?
They're not but nixos users are REALLY loud, as in, they can't spend a single day without talking about it.
New Arch. Both still worse than Silverblue.
Agreed, Silverblue is great. I would love a declarative system, but Nix just doesn't make it easy with its sprawling documentation and mix of new and old parts. I was trying to follow a guide for Home Manager, but couldn't use it because they were using flakes, I was still on the "old" configuration.nix style.
You can't make all things declarative either. If I can only have things 50% declarative, it kinda defeats the point.
I also still tried to use flatpaks since nix doesn't have sandboxing and is slower on updates, but its font configuration was broken.
Nix overall feels like it's requires a lot of workarounds, moreso than Silverblue.
But hey, at least if I ever want to try it out again, I just need to copy in my configuration.nix and make things work from there.
Yup, I did the same thing. I really wanted to make it work but I think it just needs some time to mature. Once it has some clean documentation and polishing it'll be really cool.
I really liked how NixOS has a hardware config repo. I have a Framework, used the config, and everything just worked. I mean it usually does on other distros too but it's nice to know that if there's a config it'll be guaranteed to work.
I'm currently really enjoying kinoite. I think it also has some documentation issues but it's also not as radically different from your average distro as NixOS..