After having done the switch to nixOS, I can confidently say that managing a system any other way (like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts) really is neanderthal technology and nix is superior in every single way.
It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.
My experience using NixOS on desktop is that it's 95% wonderful, 5% very painful.
If you run into friction with NixOS, you may need to have a wider/deeper understanding of what you're trying to do, compared to the more typical Linux OSs which can be beaten into shape.
Such a pity that the article didnt touch on running rust nightly or the sometimes statefull nature of user configs of some programs. The 5% painful part was just around the corner.
Fair point but I've stopped trying to declaratively manage stuff in nix that has its own idiosyncratic state management. That way youre just using nix to run an installer.
Yeah, I've been using Unixey stuff for almost twenty years now (most of it Linux, and fell for the siren song of macOS for about four of them).
I liked Arch and Ubuntu and Mint and OpenSUSE well enough when I used them first, but once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything.
Being able to temporarily install things with nix-shell is game changing, and being able to trivially see what's actually installed on my computer by quickly looking at my configuration.nix is so nice. "Uninstalling" things boils down to "remove from configuration.nix and rebuild".
The automatic snapshots upon each build allows me to be a lot "braver" when playing with configurations than I was with Arch. I was always afraid to mess with video card or wifi drivers, because if I screwed something up and if I didn't know how to get back to where I was, I might be stuck reinstalling to get back to a happy state. This didn't happen that often but often enough to have made me a bit weary about futzing with boot parameters or kernel modules. Because of the automatic snapshots with NixOS, it's much easier (and more fun) to poke with the lower level stuff, because if I do break something in a way that I don't know how to fix, the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. For example, with my current laptop, there was a weird quirk with my USB devices having to "wake up" after not being used for more than thirty seconds, meaning that I might start typing and the first three or four words wouldn't go through. After some digging, I found out that the solution is to add "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" to the kernel params. I did that and it worked.
If I had still been running Arch or Ubuntu, I probably would have just learned to put up with it, because I would have been afraid to edit kernel parameters because of the risk of breaking things in a way that I don't know how to fix.
I love NixOS. I have no desire to leave, or at least I have no desire to abandon the model. I've considered changing to GNU Guix System since I like Lisp more than I like the Nix language, but those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.
> those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.
This is now a tired discussion; the use of nonguix (https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix) is well documented, there is no practical difference after initial setup between using a regular distro and one of “those FSF-approved distros”
I am sure you don't do it on purpose, but could you stop spreading FUD? (specially given you acknowledge “ I've considered changing to GNU Guix System”, so you're here relaying 3rd party opinions, not your own)
> like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts
I just use apt, been doing it for 20 years, it works great. I've never in my time, heard of or knew anyone who wrote 20 (or any) bash script wrappers around apt. The one year I was painfully forced to use a Mac for work, brew worked similarly to apt, just used it, no need to wrap it with shell scripts.
Comparing highly functional and capable systems like apt and brew to neanderthal technology sounds like hype.
> It's also great for the AI era
That also sounds like more hype, similar to the pro-nix other comments so far which tout AI and similar to the article which I did read, also sounds like hype.
I've been using apt for 20 years too and was never a fan of it, canonical repos are never up-to-date and managing ppas is a pain. Yes I'm very hype about nixOS (and that's a rare thing for me), but it is just really really good.
I understand that "just check it out" is not the best advice because the setup cost to using nixOS is really high, and the learning curve is really steep, so it's not like you can give it a whirl for a few hours to experience the workflow. But believe me, once you are used to it, it just so so much more convenient. I'm currently managing my dev laptop, home PC, a WSL, and a hetzner server all in the same repository (allowing for a lot of code reuse). Everything is super orderly and split into modules, everything is declarative, I can roll back to a previous build of my system if I mess up installing nvidia drivers or iwd or bluetooth etc.
It's also not like installing software is harder than with apt (oftentimes it is easer, `programs.firefox.enable = true`) so after you've paid the setup cost there is just no downside. It's a bit like react vs jQuery, or Kubernetes vs hand-written deployment scripts.
It's also great for the AI era, copilot is really good with that stuff.