this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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IMHO NixOS, which is what I'm using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use "a long time ago", which leads me to believe he doesn't fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the "nix package manager", which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it's like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel's, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there's a disconnect between old nix ("stable") and new nix (flakes, "unstable", experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I'd just chime in, because this guy's take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive...
...though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you're trying to do out of the box, then it's very nice, or you'll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS's altered file structure. You don't simply add a
.desktopfile to the xsessions folder.Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don't intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.
I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it's a game changer no doubt.