I believe I am on new nixos, and will probably move to determinate systems nixos once things get a bit settled. I am just curious to hear your thoughts
I found this: Understanding the Differences Between Nix, Determinate Nix, and Lix: A Behavior Comparison by Installer
None of these things exist. There’s only stable (nixos-26.05) and unstable (nixos-unstable) channels for NixOS.
If you’re wondering about nix implementations, there’s nix, tvix, snix, lix, … I personally use lix for some quality-of-life features like better error messages and better performance in certain scenarios. Determinate system’s fork, I would argue, is barely nix since their daemon is an entirely closed-source rewrite with no plans to open-source it.
Technically you can use their nix-src fork without determinate-nixd, but it’s unsupported (I have tried that out once for WASM, not replacing the builder though).
TLDR: I’ve had issues with using lix in the 1st party live environments distributed by nixos.org
Important pitfall for lix (for beginners I guess): The official installer ISOs will not function as recovery/tweaking environments for nixos systems that run lix. This happens since the CppNix and lix nix-daemon variants are incompatible. When you nixos-enter into your installed system that runs Lix from an installer ISO with CppNix on it, you’ll run into errors like /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket: connection refused (I don’t remember the exact error but it’s something like that).
I just work around that by building a custom iso that, along with some other personal tweaks, runs Lix, so I can seamlessly nixos-enter into my systems. (for the non-nixos-savvy: this is actually easier than you think)
You can also work around this IIRC by either:
nix-build --store /mnt (but you can’t do that with nixos-rebuild, so you’ll have to call nix-build followed by nix-env --profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/system --set manually)nix-shell -p nix