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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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[–] 11 points 2 weeks ago

The first steps are rather rough, yeah. Once you have your workflow, it takes like 30 seconds to permanently install a program. Never as straightforward as an apt install micro, but well, that's where we come to the point of NixOS.

Personally, I like NixOS, because:

  • I know what's on my machine. It's written down in my configuration, rather than me having run apt install micro ages ago and then I never apt purged it when I stopped using it.
  • Similarly, I can easily undo changes. I have my configuration in Git, so I can look at what I changed and git revert it. Maybe I set my EDITOR env when I switched to Micro and it'd be a good idea to set that back. By having a Git history, I can't forget stuff like that.
  • I can sync my configuration between my personal laptop, my work laptop and my home server. And it's not just naive copying of dot files, where some settings might not make sense on one of the hosts, but rather I can tweak individual settings as I see fit.
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