Want to switch to NixOS on my server, but don't understand channels

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HELLO!!!

I am currently using Debian on my server, all I do is host docker and portainer, but I want to switch to NixOS because I like it (tried it in VM), but I really don’t understand channels, I guess these are my main questions:

1: Are you notified in any way when you are doing a nixos rebuild switch that there is a new stable branch? How are you supposed to know a new one released?

2: Can I just select a “stable” branch instead of a specific version? Or perhaps is there any way to automatically update to a new branch when it comes out? This is less of an issue if it tells you whenever there is a new version

3: I do my server updates once a week, is this fine on NixOS?

4: Honestly Debian is OK for me, but I don’t really like the installation of “jellyfin media player” (the “server” has KDE installed as well and is sometimes used as a web browser/jellyfin watching laptop) and Docker, is NixOS good for me?

5: I thought about just using unstable because it is rolling instead, but if the entire system breaks and I can’t SSH into it that would be a bit of a disaster…

THANK YOU!!!

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  • No, you are not notified, but the schedule is highly predictable. There’s a new release at the end of May and November (05 and 11) every year.
  • No, and honestly you wouldn’t want to. Upgrading to the new release is almost always at least a little bit of a manual process, as some configuration options change implementation and you need to update your config to reflect that. Do it when you have a moment to fix some errors on the rebuild.
  • Sure.
  • No experience with Jellyfin, but the great thing about nixos is that customization doesn’t have to come at the cost of difficulty updating, for the most part. You can do finicky tweaks and have them automatically applied on each update. So Nixos really is great for managing a complex or finicky piece of software.
  • Our unstable is… more unstable than most. Nixos is actually the only distro I’ve ever used where I’m not comfortable just running unstable for everything. PAM has broken multiple times in the last few years, for example. That said, you can also get out of most issues by using the bootloader rollbacks.
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Thank you so much :slight_smile: kind of stuck between staying on Debian or trying out NixOS (need to do a fresh install anyway), NixOS does seem really nice, but unsure if the “negatives” (not really negatives tbh) outweigh the positives

Also, would you happen to know if there’s any easy way of “debloating” KDE? One thing that really bothers me about my Debian install is that it installed a bunch of stuff that my minimal use case really doesn’t need (discover, Akonadi (file indexing), even a KDE Firefox extension Plasma Integration…))

Thanks again

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Also. if you are fine with Debian but doesn’t want like how specific things are installed but have some space, you can also have Nix on Debian managing just those things. It does mean you’ll have some duplication, like Debian glibc and Nixpkgs glibc, but they are in different places etc. This is also something you can try without reinstalling.

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For Jellyfin it works fine for me, I have a few clients connecting to it on different platforms without issue. My configs are here though I do have passwords and such removed in the git copy:

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