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What exactly is the use case of NixOS? (piefed.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip
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I'm an Arch user (CachyOS now) and I've gotten used to doing things a certain way. Anyway, I have another computer with a fresh Windows 11 install. After literally 5 hours of troubleshooting, I still could not get the fuckass wi-fi drivers installed. People who say Windows is easy clearly never had to install it. I eventually said fuck it and decided to install NixOS. I'm used to Arch based distros so I wanted to try something new. I'm very confused about how it works and what it's intended use case is. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to install micro permanently. I did RTFM but It didn't really help. I guess I'm hoping someone can share some words of encouragement and/or convince and/or bully me into sticking with this weird ass distro.

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[–] 10 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I'm on nixos now for several years: Don't stick with it if you don't have the issues it's solving! Nix is an own language, literally - and you'd have to learn it to really get comfortable with it.

To give you the personal anecdote:

I'm running arch an my desktop and laptop and nixos on my server. The main reason for nixos me is "protection from myself": with having the generations and deterministic definitions allows me to test something and discard it without any leftovers.

It's just a completely different mindset. For my server I want to first define my system and then build it. On my client I want to quickly install something.

And to make it worse: reading the manual is mockery in my opinion, created by the Linux equivalent of the Cenobites who ravel in our suffering. In my opinion, documentation quality reaches from arch simi on the one hand to the nixos... thing on the other.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    On my client I want to quickly install something.

    I have a shell script for that.

    $ cat ~/.local/bin/ns 
#!/bin/sh
nix-shell -p "$1" --command "$*"

    Need Gimp? Run nix-shell -p gimp and you have Gimp in your $PATH.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Yeah you're right! That approach is ephemeral though - you still have to then update your build config if you like it.

    And it's just ... I don't know, it doesn't match my nixos mental model. But that again could be caused by me having it only on server environments. Perhaps I'll give nixos on a client a shot at my next job (currently locked in MacOS mainly which is such an annoying pain it's ...)

    Oh and something that's different than from many other distros for me: upstream management is quite a bit slower, even on unstable:

    a generation switch takes around 30 minutes for me - ironically hm switch even longer with flake updates.

    Both are caused by software I follow upstream so close though that I have to compile it myself, that's not "normal" for most nixos users I assume :)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    That approach is ephemeral though - you still have to then update your build config if you like it.

    So it is. However, I find it easier to think "now where was that text file that holds my list of desired packages" than "now which package manager was I using in this machine? Was it Alpine/apk or Ubuntu/apt" - and I haven't used any RPM-based distros for decades, now, so I'd have to look up a newb guide for these...

    upstream management is quite a bit slower, even on unstable

    Well, yeah, if you have to recompile a package every time, then it's gonna take time :) I can't see how it could be faster on Arch, though. Unless your package also pulls in beta dependencies, so you'll have a whole dependency tree to recompile.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    Aur is following upstream way closer than nixos unstable. But I apologize if I have implied that this is nixos' fault, I just wanted to give OP a bit of everyday insights from a nixos user - I really enjoy nixos!

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