I used nix with Debian. Debian because I don’t want to update my system and find out it can’t load graphics anymore (hello Arch based distros). But the tradeoff is I need to use “stable” packages. And keep finding myself need to run app that are not in Debian packages so I took the plunge and installed NixOS.
I am here for:
Latest and widest range of packages.
Atomic changes.
Ability to rollback.
No dependency hell.
All the configuration in a few places. (bye bye saving a bunch of dotfiles of different apps)
In a world where every other distro is a derivative I think NixOS is doing something exciting.
For more than a decade, I was a devoted Gentoo user, running it faithfully on my entire fleet of Thinkpads. However, I began to experience system slowdowns on my Thinkpad X260, and each update increasingly demanded tedious, time-consuming recompilations. There has been countless nights when I would leave my computer to grinding through the compilation of KDE, Firefox, and the rest. This process was no longer sustainable, and it became clear to me that I needed a faster, more eco-friendly binary packages based distribution.
Then, Lenovo announced the X13 Gen 2, my dream laptop. As I anxiously awaited its release in Belgium, which, spoiler alert, never happened, I decided to explore an intriguing OS I’d been hearing about: NixOS.
I bought a new hard disk drive and gave NixOS a test run. To my surprise, I found myself not wanting to return to my old Gentoo-loaded hard drive - a companion of 10 years now gathering dust (rest in peace, little angel).
Eventually, I managed to acquire an X13 Gen 2 from the UK, promptly installing NixOS onto it. I’ve also switched my Raspberry Pi router at home and replaced my FreeBSD laptop to run on NixOS. Now, I’m completely immersed in the NixOS ecosystem, and I absolutely love it. I can’t imagine returning to any other OS. The convenience of managing all my devices from a single GitHub repository is nothing short of a revelation, it’s just pure bliss.
In retrospect, I can’t help but question why I didn’t try this amazing OS earlier. What was I doing with all that time?! It’s a regretful realization, but also a joyful discovery.
I love base distros, systems that are made from scratch and give you a new system alternative, so I explored many of them so far.
I found out about NixOS on YT, and I decided to check out how the system is like as a lover of Debian testing, Arch and a few other base distros.
Then I found out about the magic of NixOS:
“What? Your system’s packages, /etc configuration files and system daemons all configured declaratively in configuration.nix?? Wow”
“Wait, there’s both a stable and unstable release? Wait, the package repository is huge!!!”
“I can upload my system’s configuration file easily anywhere and reproduce my system somewhere else!”
“Oh, nix-shell is so cool, so nice”
“Nix generations give me more confidence to mess it all up safely!”
“There’s both a manual installation setup and Calamares, that’s really flexible, and due to the declarative nature of the system, both are able to give you the same setup!”
“The base system install is quite minimal, that’s really cool if I want to set up the system as I wish!”
“Certain packages, such as programming interpreters and the Linux kernel, have multiple versions on the repo! I can choose what kernel I actually want to use!! I can even have a more modern kernel on the stable release!”
And of course the most important aspect:
“What a nice logo”
I instantly created a NixOS virtual machine and spent hours figuring out the system and configuration.nix and the package repository. This is such a cool, unique, powerful and flexible system. There are still a few things I know nothing about, such as packaging software as nixpkgs yourself or using flakes, but even if I don’t use 100% of NixOS’s potential, I can already feel a great power using this system.
The major downside to me is the FHS, it makes standalone dynamic-linked binaries and appimages unusable without steam-run, appimage-run, a patching process or a packaging process. But honestly I rarely need to use standalone unpackaged software, and when I do, I don’t mind using at least steam-run. I’m pretty well served with nix and flatpak though.
I ended up using NixOS after Canonical ed the bed one too many times(the tipping point was Snaps which produce such a horrible UX on various fronts that my respect for Canonical dropped into the negative, and hasn’t recovered since).
I have seriously also had multiple times that an Ubuntu install just mysteriously borked itself, and while in theory that should be fixable, that would then take arbitrary amounts of time, while a reinstall would take half an hour, with perhaps another hour configuring the system afterwards.
And all this was without me doing anything particularly exotic with or to the machine.
This little dance got really tiring after a while, and I started looking around. RPM-based distros aren’t fundamentally better than DEB-based ones, so eg Fedora didn’t appeal to me (not to mention Red Hat is now owned by IBM, which is never a good sign from my POV). I’d used Arch in the past but back then there was too much breakage for my liking (though since at least the Steam Deck has been available for sale, that’s apparently gotten better since the Steam Deck is as stable as a rock).
So ultimately I also decided against Arch.
And then I was reminded of NixOS, which I was already vaguely familiar with, I decided to look at its raison d’etre, and when I saw that not only could I have my entire system config in a git repo, but that it could also solve dependency hell from first principles, I decided to give it a try. Afterwards I realized that that same mechanism also obviated the need for containers in a lot of scenarios (which I’ve never liked as part of a desktop system because the containers aren’t free in terms of system resources; Snaps are just an extremely poor implementation of that idea, applied to applications), and at that point I was sold on NixOS.
That was in I think 2021, and I’ve never looked back.
Since then the number of hosts I use with NixOS has grown, and soon will be expanded with an ARM-based SBC with 4 NVMe drive bays, which I intend to use as a really fast NAS (its 2.5GbE port shouldn’t be hard to fully saturate with the NVMe drives) that’s also fully silent and pretty energy-efficient (I live in West-Europe, where prices of electricity are the highest in the extended region).
ed the bed one too many times(the tipping point was Snaps which produce such a horrible UX on various fronts that my respect for Canonical dropped into the negative, and hasn’t recovered since).