this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I thought I was finally finished distro hopping after I landed on Fedora, but then I found Nobara and then the whole RHEL drama started so I went back to Debian stable but then NixOS caught my attention.
It will never end
i just don't do distrohopping, it's a pointless venture imo. started with arch linux as my main desktop, never went back.
tried some things occasionally, but i already sunk the time learning all sorts of things that may not even exist in other distros, configuring my system and the DE (and other things like zsh and vim setup), so it's just a waste of time honestly.
i'm thinking of using NixOS instead of Debian (what i used previously) for my upcoming server project though.
M'federation
I hopped for ages and finally landed on Arch (btw), and I thought I was settled. I've been on it for like two years now.
But lately I've been hearing the call of NixOS too...
Yep, tried a couple distros out and ended up on Arch for a year and was happy. Then switched over to NixOS and have been using it ever since, there's no way I could ever main any other distro.
The Arch -> NixOS pipeline is real
I've skipped the middle men and went from Mint to NixOS. I've used Mint since the Ubuntu Unity thing, so 2011 if I can trust some random wiki entry I just found.
NixOS was for me the thing that stopped me from distro hopping and re-installations. I just don't care anymore to switch to anything, everything works how I want and I can focus on using it.
I’m using Debian right now, and it has been the most stable, and battery efficient distro I’ve used on my laptop. I see NixOS a lot on here, and went to look it up. I couldn’t discern really what makes it good, so may I ask for your “review” of it compared to Debian?
If you happen to customize your OS a lot, with NixOS you can define everything from one configuration: all your packages, your shell aliases, kernel parameters or for example the desktop wallpaper.
You can push this config to GitHub and clone it to another NixOS machine and that one will have exactly the same packages, kernel parameters, shell aliases and wallpaper. Even the package versions, including all the libraries will be the same everywhere.
You can even patch your tools from these configs, have custom kernels and go really crazy. When you commit your changes, they work exactly the same in all your machines. And on boot, you get a list of configurations, so you can boot to the previous config of your current changes broke something, go fix what you broke and retry.
And, with nix the tool, your team can provide the
flake.nixandflake.lockfiles in the software project you all work for. It will then make sure everybody gets the right versions from the dependencies, compilers, linters, etc. If it works for one, it works for all.Nix the tool let's you try this out in systems like other Linux distros or removed. NixOS is an OS that is taking a step further and requiring you to define the whole system with Nix.
Oh, and a sibling project Home Manager is great for reproducible dotfiles.
Thank you so very much for your review. It helped me understand it a lot more than their webpage did! I’m a casual when it comes to Linux in that I just want to set it up, and never touch it again unless I get bored or have to. This sounds like a tinkerer’s dream OS, and that is awesome in itself. It’s just more technical than I have the time for right now.
Adding a little to the other comment: Nix packages are fully reproducible, so you can verify they're built from the source they're claimed to be. That makes package distribution more secure. (E.g. Debian could add malicious code to some packages before compiling them, and you'd never know. Not saying they do that, but they're able to.)
Thank you for the further explanation! I was able to see from the above that it may not be an OS for a casual Linux user like myself, but I think it is awesome for someone who wants to tinker to their hearts desire and make their system their own!
Maybe adding a warning to my previous comment. Going full-on NixOS is like learning vim for the first time. It is complex, takes a lot of time and you need to re-learn lots of things. Maybe evaluate are the good parts enough for you to spend a year re-learning how you use computers worth it. For me it definitely was.
I swear, the only reason I haven't continued distrohopping is that I'm waiting for Pop_OS!'s Cosmic desktop and they are holding out on me