I’ve been using NixOS for just over a year and wanted to write a quick post to show my appreciation for everyone who makes this happen. I started using Linux back in 2008 and distro hopped a lot. Then went to Mac and in recent years Windows. But just over a year ago I decided to get back into Linux. I jumped in with Debian but quickly heard about this mystical thing called NixOS. Intrigued, I stuck it on my laptop and instantly loved it. I’m just a basic, regular user - I do work on it, but it’s mostly LibreOffice + Firefox + maintaining my homelab (also NixOS) + a few other bits and pieces. Absolutely nothing fancy. But I’m now so used to it that the idea of not having backup generations or a declarative config feels wrong. Most of the people in this place are pretty intimidating, with their high-level (it seems to me) coding skills and intricate setups. So, I wanted to say (1) thanks for keeping this thing going, and (2) NixOS isn’t just for computer science wizards!
I have yet to meet the mythical god-like hacker who gets everything right on the first try and has finished their perfect config. We’re all fiddlers like you!
I also have been secretly(?) enjoying NixOS for few years, thanks for sharing your love on behalf of me and probably many others!
With piggybacking your post, I too shout out to everyone who’s making this happen and also just simply for using it as well (I get inspired a lot from other people’s configs!)
I’m sad to say, that as much as I wanted to take on NixOS, I eventually quit. My main issue was that at some point my previously valid configuration file became invalid, as some dependencies changed, and despite my updating the config file, successive builds resulted in a non-working system config.
Specifically I lost the ability to use my keyboard and mouse, and no matter what I did I could not get it back.
Just to clarify, I have my configuration file versioned with git, and I rolled it back to my previously working state (I set up releases for each successful build), but after some time, that previously working configuration stopped working.
Well then the revision of Nixpkgs must have changed in between and caused your issue. If you know the last good revision id, you could do a first-parent bisect between it and the current newest revision to find out which change caused this.
Though I find it unlikely that anything Nixpkgs did would cause such a dramatic failure directly and that what you observe here is caused by i.e. a newer kernel instead.
I’m grateful, too. I moved to NixOS from Arch Linux about 6 months ago (or was it a year?), where I had been for about 4 years after 10 years of MacOS.
I’m a professional illustrator by day, and artist by night, doing a lot on creative coding (with SuperCollider and Godot mainly, but not only).
I must say I struggled a bit to set everything up, but once it was done it has worked seamlessly.
