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What exactly is the use case of NixOS? (piefed.world)
submitted 2 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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[–] 3 points 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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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