This article is spot on. Fantastic operating system with a clear concept of how it should be done. And great for people that want to fight for it. But everything you want to do that's slightly off the path is a 3 hour research project in documentation that's pretty damn poor. It eventually wears you out.
Damn right. And the Nixos community forums are full of people unwilling to accept this. They will gaslight you into thinking you're the problem. "Just do this", as I'd it's completely obvious and you're dumb for not realising that. Of course if they find out you have some ideological incompatibility with them, you're out anyway.
NIXOS really needs a fork. One that embraces or rejects flakes outright. One that stops inviting ideological battles. And one that embraces documentation.
Switching is hard, but going back is impossible.
I also think- how often am I borking or reinstalling my desktop?
It's a good idea but I've been running the same system for years and years. All that effort goes kind of unused. I replicated most of what I'd need in a single ansible playbook over the years that didn't take long. In the rare event I need to reinstall at all.
The problem is that NixOS achieves all of this by breaking assumptions that almost all Linux software relies on. Most Linux binaries assume the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard exists, and they expect interpreters and libraries at fixed global paths.
This is a problem of those applications, we began to make appimages that do not make those assumptions and work in NixOS directly. (And this also means it works in places like alpine where a lot of those binaries wont either).
People like to throw the FHS around but the reality is that not a single distro follows it fully, I wouldn't rely on it to be the same in the near future at all.
This title is exactly right
I wonder how many Nix cheerleaders are aware of OSTree based systems like Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, etc? They provide the same immutability guarantees, but none of the pain and standards-defiance of NixOS.
I think Nix (the package manager) is a much stronger sell than NixOS. You can use Nix to install your apps on top of another immutable OS, whereas otherwise you might go with Flatpaks, containers, AppImages, etc. It's certainly better than adding Homebrew or some other manager like Pacman.
For devs, Nix is nice for people who can't or don't want to use containers for any reason (or want to use both!). I just don't see anyone benefiting from using NixOS except for Nix addicts.
Lol love the title.
I feel the same about KDE on Wayland, it's amazing but it's not stable enough yet.
Took my laptop to work and it had a stroke when I plugged it into the office monitors
Didn't they start going anti-woke at some point? I was very excited about nixos when i started trying it and then between the weapons sponsorships and some anti woke stuff i read about at the time, i moved on
Personally, i dream of a stateless, tag/attribute-based, tree-less operating system. "directories" would not be neccessary but a tag could be displayed as one in file managers. Want to load a library? type:library, name:xyz it is.
Stuff is there on the disk anyway, you just have to identify it.
But that would require the whole system and the tooling made for this.
But maybe we get there; since the young generation isn't used to file trees anymore.
Edit: ok, scratch the kernel, it could work.
its amusing my first/second Distro was NixOS(and i didnt know much Linux,and someone told me its a good distro)
It seems needlessly complicated. I installed it as a virt like I do with most distros and it seems like they are dumbing it all down to the point its headed toward android levels of needless complication.
NixOS has some neat ideas but goes to the deep end implementing a near-perfect design of those ideas. If you need those ideas, it's really great.
I'm fantasizing about doing a lipstick-on-pig kind of a facsimile of NixOS on top of Arch Linux.
Fuck nix and anduril, go guix!
I tried nixos. But alas, I don't have the time to unlearn traditional Linux management and get into the groove that makes it click for others. I don't run a homelab, my dev environment is my company's macbook that connects to development rhel servers through ssh or vscode. I run popOs for what little time i have to tinker in my free time.
I tried tinkering with NixOS in a VM on apple silicon. The experience of finding what image to download for Apple Silicon and installing the OS was straightforward and i did manage to start getting the hang of it. But very quickly realized you start out maintaining packages through the system config file, invest some time, discover home-manager, and then later discover flakes. Then I also discovered none of the tools like neovim, python work like they do on imperative distros.
At least with python the right way to manage is to forget using pip or uv in the traditional manner and simply use the nix-shell feature per directory which is actually the most frictionless way to do that in my experience.
I can see how nix and nixos are godsend for DevOps, server folks who need reproducible builds, love configuration as code that compilss the same way every time and anywhere, and hate non-deterministic behavior.
But yes. The author is right. I too felt like the OS needs your time until you set it up just right for your needs. Daily driving it is not a install and go affair unless you already have a repo of configs built up.
And if you're like me and anxious about having everything organized "just right" it will be a nightmare of ignorance until you find the best practices which certainly takes a lot more time and kindness on yourself than you might allow or actually possess.
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