Why I love NixOS

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.

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)".

[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 !

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.