Hi,
I’m looking for a distribution as my daily desktop driver. For past ~15 years I’m running debian testing with i3/sway and my low footprint, heavily customized setup. I love the idea of declarative configuration and lovely rollback features, but switching seems like a large and risky leap, hence I’m asking for some help.
I primarily look for a stable and predictable environment. What drove me away from arch years ago was they changed crucial filesystem layout and simple pacman update broke whole OS and they blamed users for not following main arch blog. I decided to start working with grown-ups and moved away immediately to debian. But you all know what Debian brings to the table: old stuff, more often than not there is no .deb package etc. I slowly grew frustrated and would like an easy way to compose my system of stable core components and experimental stuff. So:
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Is NixOS more like Fedora/Debian stability-wise or are there more youthfull decisions like in Arch?
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I’m a bit confused about Nix package manager and NixOS Can I install Nix package manager and have declarative configuration for packages it brings to the table that will work well with rest of the system? Like could I install a wayland compositor using provided flake and it would “just work” with rest of my ancient debian testing distro? If so - this is awesome news, since it would allow me a step-by-step transition, indead of deep dive.
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Perhaps the best approach is just to spin up a vm and take my sweet time getting to know the full os?
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How well does NixOS perform as desktop environment? I don’t mind steep learning curve (especially since core concepts are so fun), but I do mind constant battles to make things work. Is if a fairly smooth ride assuming we know how to use nixos or not the best choice for desktop?
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- There’s
nixos-unstable and a stable channel (currently nixos-25.05, but in a few weeks we will have nixos-25.11 released). You pick your level of stability, but you will still be required to upgrade to the next stable release after 6 months with the stable release. Stable releases are in the end of May and November, and you get a 1-month period after that to migrate slowly off of the older deprecated release before you stop getting updates altogether.
- Probably not, you can try, but I don’t think graphics drivers would play that well together. You also need to do some additional config yourself if not using NixOS, that sounds harder than using NixOS honestly.
- Sure.
- Works fine for me (sway). It’s just a Linux distro at the end of the day.
Also keep in mind rollbacks only apply to system configuration and not to any data that your apps produce or your personal data. You will still want to maintain proper backups for those.
EDIT: also you should probably never encounter such an extreme issue like the filesystem layout changing, foremost because NixOS is going to abstract that away anyway, we don’t follow FHS in the literal sense other than having /etc(there is basically no usable /usr or so on). Paths are relative to the current generation /run/current-system, so if that layout changes that probably wouldn’t even be noticeable nor should it require any manual user intervention. The main types of breaking changes you may encounter is that nixpkgs will tend to drop end-of-life software quickly - but if upstream is not maintaining it, I don’t think most distros would want to keep it either.
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Thanks! I’ll roll out in vm and slowly move to desktop then 
let the adventure begin
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Generally Nix-on-non-NixOS works well. There are sometimes GPU issues because hardware is always lying and driver versions matter. So Wayland compositors are in the most vulnerable position. Probably Nvidia proprietary drivers yield the most complicated compatibility situation, open-source drivers including Nouveau should give you OK chances of Mesa working.
I’d say that a failure of update with anything large Nixpkgs-using (with NixOS or without) is likely to happen eventually, but it is generally a failed evaluation or build, so before affecting anything but resource usage — and most things that switch nominally fine then stop working are still helped by rolling back (possibly via a reboot)
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