Is anyone using NixOS as their daily driver?
I'm currently running Arch and it's great, but I'm noticing I'm not staying on the ball in regards to updates. I've been reading a bit about Nix and NixOS and thinking of trying it as my daily driver. I've got a Lenovo x1 xtreme laptop, I don't do much gaming (except OSRS), use firefox, jetbrains stuff, bitwarden, remmina, obsidian, and docker.
Is anyone running NixOS as their daily? How are you liking it and are there any pitfalls / stuff you wish you knew before?
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as long as the existing packages are enough*, it's really good. if you need to start packaging stuff yourself this is when you'll usually start hitting the pain points (of both Nix the language and the documentation)
*: nixpkgs does have a huge number of packages but that count is massively over-inflated by essentially being a meta-repo that also contains all the language-specific dependencies of it's packages (think pip or npm) and mostly-auto-generated vim plugin packages and whatnot. for things you'd actually want to install "manually" the breadth of the AUR still trumps it in my experience
I recently played with the AUR on Debian using Distrobox, could that be used on NixOS too?
When I experimented around with NixOS, I never got a chance to play around with Distrobox specifically - however I did use Podman with no issue, which is what Distrobox uses behind the scenes so I suspect it should work.
There's also a Distrobox package in Nixpkgs which further affirms my belief in that.
Is it, though?
https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique
Nonunique means other package managers have it, so it excludes those you said that inflate the user count