Why everyone is switching to NixOS ?

★ Ｌ０Ｗｉｇｈ@sh.itjust.works to Linux@lemmy.ml – 15 points –

Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

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I used NixOS for a couple of years. My experience is like this:

  1. It is a rolling release (mostly)
  2. You write a declarative configuration for your system, e.g., my config will say I want Neovim with certain plugins, and I can also include my Neovim configuration
  3. It is stable, and when it breaks it is easy to go back
  4. Packages are mostly bleeding edge

Note that there's both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.

Important to note that NixOS has both a rolling release and point release version.

The configuration stuff seems great. I guess it reduce the struggle of porting a full config from one pc to another right ?

You can even define configurations for different systems/hosts/users from a single place. I'ev atomized my config and I can reuse lots of parts for my different machines. Also my user config is nearly identical (except hardware specific things).

Yes absolutely. It is really great. It is also a source of frustration, e.g., missing configuration options, non-obvious options and so on. Overall it works well.

Are you still using it and happy with it? I've been increasingly using single purpose dev VMs in a server, and a declarative configuration system would make the process of spinning them up faster and more robust. My current shell script system is clunky, and I've been looking at Ansible.

Not using it anymore. Although I'm thinking about going back to it. The NixOS learning curve is a bit more steep than most other distros.