I’ve been doing some research about NixOS and actually loved it.
but i have been thinking, should i switch to NixOS or no ? cuz i play video games all the time and program too. My laptop config is i7-13620H / 24 gb ram ddr5 / 512 gb ssd / intel UHD graphics familly.
i have some experience with linux like zorinOS, Ubuntu, Kali, Arch and CachyOS but none of them was my thing for (i run them in vm but not arch cuz i had a secondary laptop and it was fun to use but i didn’t consider it as my main) but ultimately is it a good idea to switch or not cuz i am bored with windows things.
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NixOS is challenging, especially if you don’t code (which I don’t know), but if you’re willing to learn, it’s a super power. Gaming on NixOS is just fine, if you ask me. Nixers are smart and they want to game. So Nixpkgs has Steam, Lutris and other gaming software and configuration examples can be found by searching GitHub, for example.
You can try it out in a VM! The cool thing is, that if you do like to use it, you can simply yoink the configuration file which you used there and continue from there without losing your progress 
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I do program but not much but the one that i am still afraid of if my fps will drop and been not like windows microslop’s fps and as u say about Nixpkgs has every gaming software i will see about this. Thanks btw 
Intresting, i’ve read that you can copie poeple’s configuration.nix is it true ? and is it that easy to config the flakes ?
I know how to program but I’m definitely not a programmer. In my opinion, the best thing NixOS offers is total reproducibility. That is one of the rarest and most valuable things an operating system can offer. The assurance I get from knowing that if my laptop explodes tomorrow, I can have a new, identical system up and running on another machine in less than twenty minutes is absolutely priceless. You don’t think it’s a big deal until you need it. The best part is that there are no additional tools needed-- the same system updates, rolls-back, and installs your machine out of the box. Especially as a non-technical person who needs stuff to just work, NixOS is unparalleled. As I understand it, games work fine :).
This is mostly true-- you might have to be careful about some technical or machine-specific stuff. For example, if I blindly copied the configuration I use on my laptop to another machine, the parts of my configuration that deal with the swap partition (which wasn’t detected by nixos-generate-config) and secure-boot (which requires a little bit of manual effort to configure) probably wouldn’t work. If you’re careful about how you set things up, this isn’t a concern. If you’re looking at other people’s configurations, just look out for stuff that is machine-specific (e.g. the name of a partition).
Yeah it is very underrated i don’t see many people talk about it, mostly i’ve heard is really good for programmers and it is very stable some times can but it needs just little fixes, for my point of view i see NixOS is very good and i think it has more potential if there was more attention for it.
But what about Flakes can it be really easy to use or u need just more time to configure it ?
I don’t use flakes for anything complicated-- really just for version control on my main configuration (so that building a previous revision is truly the same), but they’re not complicated. It’s just one extra file and you have to run nix flake update when you want to update packages.
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Oh okay thank you for the info
I start every OS in VM. After >10 years of Debian (on desktop, workstations and little servers) I’m very satisfied to configure NixOS. If you feel the love, don’t ignore it!
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My suggestion is to start simple first. Just NixOS, no flakes, no Home Manager. Get that set up the way you like, learn how to maintain it, and if you want to move to flakes or Home Manager later you can.
I use NixOS and Home Manager myself. I don’t use flakes.
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I agree and recommend you @Mohamed-404-art to try working through the official tutorials on https://nix.dev. We’ve put a lot of effort into making them smooth for developers when I was still involved, and at least not insurmountable even for people not deep into programming. It is substantial work for learners though (the recent survey results show that a large part of NixOS users are experienced developers, and that has reasons and consequences) and the material is by far not complete, but my claim is that if you put in the effort you’ll get a solid basis for having fun with Nix for many years.
And we have a lot of great people here on Discourse who will gladly help you out if you come with informed questions, including current documentation maintainers who will likely go out of their way to keep improving the tutorials if you provide constructive feedback.
If your gaming works on other linux distros, you’ll be fine here.
Do a GUI installer, and do nix-shell -p claude-code or similar, and it’ll get you the rest of the way. You can learn by watching or asking it to guide you instead of just doing the work for you–and if that’s not enough, the community is here too.
https://nix.dev/ is awesome. I went through most of it on my own learning journey not too long ago.
But, I think the module system deep dive is a little much for beginners. My recommendation is to skip that and come back if you’re feeling really adventurous.
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I do recommend you read it at some point though, It’s not essential for new users but is quite interesting and helps you understand how NixOS/HM/etc work under the hood.
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Everyone’s got their opinion on how to jump in, so I’ll share mine: find something you’ve been itching to self host and just punch it into https://search.nixos.org and explore the options. Then if you want to add anything it’s usually a PR away (though you can run your own modules too if it doesn’t get merged).
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Thanks for the information !!! i am really glad there is a platform like this and i will count for this one if i had some problem with NixOS. Glad for the info thanks again 
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ooh that was very useful information, Thanks a loot!!