this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

People love Nix because of the OS configuration based around a single config file. Essentially, you define your system configuration in this file, including installed programs, then you rebuild your system based on that configuration.

The beauty here is that you can easily move this file to another machine running NixOS and reproduce your configuration there. You can also roll back changes by simply rebooting and choosing the last known good build and you're back in business.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hmm, I've never heard of NixOS. Is it suppose to be like blendOS or CurtainOS? A blend of different desktop environments?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (8 children)

What about Nix's financial issues? Have they been resolved yet?

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I don’t know NixOS. My Linux machine runs Pop_OS and Manjaro.

What are the pros and cons of NixOS ?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago

They don’t know about Debian stable.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They're not but nixos users are REALLY loud, as in, they can't spend a single day without talking about it.

New Arch. Both still worse than Silverblue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Agreed, Silverblue is great. I would love a declarative system, but Nix just doesn't make it easy with its sprawling documentation and mix of new and old parts. I was trying to follow a guide for Home Manager, but couldn't use it because they were using flakes, I was still on the "old" configuration.nix style.

You can't make all things declarative either. If I can only have things 50% declarative, it kinda defeats the point.

I also still tried to use flatpaks since nix doesn't have sandboxing and is slower on updates, but its font configuration was broken.

Nix overall feels like it's requires a lot of workarounds, moreso than Silverblue.

But hey, at least if I ever want to try it out again, I just need to copy in my configuration.nix and make things work from there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yup, I did the same thing. I really wanted to make it work but I think it just needs some time to mature. Once it has some clean documentation and polishing it'll be really cool.

I really liked how NixOS has a hardware config repo. I have a Framework, used the config, and everything just worked. I mean it usually does on other distros too but it's nice to know that if there's a config it'll be guaranteed to work.

I'm currently really enjoying kinoite. I think it also has some documentation issues but it's also not as radically different from your average distro as NixOS..

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