Hello I’m currently using an arch based distro. I have a general understanding on programming and linux systems. I want to distro hop because I can’t make jobs done with arch. It needs a regular maintenance and when I have to work with documents I get some dumb errors and It makes me frusturated.
Rn I’m considering Devuan, Debian and NixOS
so I have some questions about NixOS
Is it stable? Or more stable than arch
Is graphical installer good to start with?
What are the differences of NixOS?
Like with most things in life the fastest way of figuring out if you like it is to give it a try.
Is graphical installer good to start with?
yup
Is it stable? Or more stable than arch
Probably? With NixOS you can roll back to your previous state if you mess up your system.
What are the differences of NixOS?
NixOS is many things to many people. The website gives a pretty good overview and there’s some good youtube videos if you search for “nixos”.
The most obvious thing is that you’re going to declare everything you want to do in a nix configuration file rather than messing around with lots of random linux files and running lots of terminal commands.
The flip side is that you’ll end up reading a lot of things about nix to properly understand how that works.
I want to distro hop because I can’t make jobs done with arch. It needs a regular maintenance and when I have to work with documents I get some dumb errors and It makes me frusturated.
Most likely, NixOS will be much, much worse for what you’re after.
With NixOS, you won’t be able to just copy+paste instructions from StackOverflow as you typically can with other Linux distributions. So, when you encounter something frustrating with NixOS, it’s much more frustrating to deal with. When you hit an error in NixOS, it will be obnoxious.
NixOS generally isn’t painful to use. (Mostly, the benefits far outweigh the costs). But for when you’re trying to do something, and it doesn’t work, it’s much more painful than in other distributions.
(And if you’re considering Devuan because you don’t like systemd, well, NixOS uses systemd. But if you like Nix, then you should take a look at gnu guix system).
If you are able to get NixOS up and running, and working for whatever tasks you’ll need to do with it: then NixOS is a great choice for an OS.
I’d say the main ethos to Nix/NixOS is “putting in effort now, in order to save putting in effort later”. Nix is a technically interesting and unusual package manager. It has all sorts of features that make for a better developer experience. – If what you see of Nix sounds interesting, I’d say NixOS is worth a try.