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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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[–] 6 points 2 weeks ago

I have not used NixOS, but heavily use their package manager at work. In the package manager context, there are two big benefits:

  1. You can have directory specific environments. For example, with direvn once you 'cd foo' you can magically have a JDK, go installed that doesn't impact the rest of your system
  2. By putting flake into your repo you can guarantee that each developer will have the same environment

Glancing at NixOS, it looks like it follows the same pattern but at the OS layer. If you like declarative configuration that could be an upside. The bigger upside would come if you have multiple machines that you want to behave the same.

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