[martijn9612]

NixOS feels great, I love it. The only gripe I have with it is the inability to just run a custom binary on it. For me the explanations on how to get it to work or write a ?Nixpkg? file was not very clear. Now I'm back on ubuntu and missing the simplicity of NixOS, everything was just so simple and light. I've used ubuntu, arch, manjaro and elementeryOS before, but NixOS felt the nicest.

I don't want to distrohop anymore, Arch was awesome and NixOS feels like the next step. But it doesn't really feel ready for a (maybe) less experienced user. It feels a bit like gentoo in the way that you need to re-link the libs for non-nixos packages or package a binary you just built yourself.

I think the thing I'm going to try next is PopOS with only the Nix package manager, it feels like a good middle ground between living in configs and no hassle with non-entry level documentation.

[44point2]

Sounds like we've made exactly the same distro-hopping journey. I went from Arch -> NixOS -> Ubuntu, and am now torn between Pop!_OS, Fedora Silverblue, or back to NixOS. I thought Ubuntu would be nirvana - just use the defaults, and use the computer as a tool rather than endlessly tweaking it forever - but it's less "just works" than I was lead to believe and I miss knowing the exact state of my system just from a set of nix files. I'd love to know if your Pop!_OS + Nix solution works.

[jbboehr]

It's kind of a pain, but you can use buildFHSUserEnv [0] to run a custom binary. If memory serves, this also works by writing the config for buildFHSUserEnv in a .nix file, running it with nix-shell, and then running the desired binary "the old-fashioned way."

[0]: https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-fhs-environments