As the title implies, should I do it? I love Arch so far, and I can fix most issues that pop out. However, I sometimes wish to start fresh without too much hassle, but I get a feeling NixOS isn’t as mature as Arch.
Have any of you used both, and if so, what do you miss from Arch? What are you grateful for in NixOS?
I’ve also been distro-hopping, but settled on NixOS. I find it very clean, you know exactly where your (system-level) configuration files are (…and could even manage user-level config files using home-manager). There is a stable branch, which is, well, stable. And even if it wasn’t, you can rollback the system at any point, which is trivial (just select a different generation during boot).
One of the biggest advantages for me is universal reproducible working environments. Using Nix+direnv, I can lock all tools (make, gcc, JupyterLab, Python, Julia) that I’m using in a project to specific versions (and upgrade/rollback). I can install programs/libraries in a
nix shelland they will be removed on the next garbage collection. Upgrades are extremely safe: I once had a problem with RAM that corrupted a lot of my files during an upgrade. Nix can detect and repair this.Downside is that Nix doesn’t follow FHS, so some programs need a little help, for example by Nix’
steam-run.Do you mind me asking what FHS means in this context?
FHS is the filesystem hierarchy standard than Linux and most Unix/Unix-like systems use. The Wikipedia entry has a good simple explanation. The full standard can be found here. NixOS does not use this standard, as it’s not compatible with many features Nix offers.
If you make the switch you won’t be able to tell people you use Arch, so keep that in mind.
true, but you’ll be able to tell people you use nix
Nix is the new Arch
NixOS is as mature as arch, I’d say, but because of its nature it has issues here and there, but rarely so.
That said, the learning curve for nix/nixos is very very very steep, so good luck learning. It took me a while for me to use it nicely, and even then, I’m nothing more than a beginner. Even so, I’m quite comfortable and pretty much can’t use any other linux distro.
I don’t get why everyone says it’s so bad, you get a decent starter config and to install stuff you just add one line to it
Installed it bare metal on a Friday and was up and running by Monday
By no means a master of it but the config is pretty intuitive generally speaking
That’s true for the configuration.nix. I still cannot fully wrap my head around using Nix Flakes for managing my nixos configuration, home manager and overlaying or creating packages. My setup so far works, but I still don’t feel like I fully understand it.
That’s more or less the same boat I’m in tbh. I’m just starting to play around with using shells for development environments
