[mixedCase]

caveat: gargantuan learning curve. Expect to be learning a small yet slightly odd programming language and an ecosystem years in the making. As a distro it is strictly only useful for very technically minded people or people who rely on someone like that to maintain their distro for them.

But once you do learn it and fully prepared your set-up, it's amazing. Around a month ago I switched from Arch to NixOS after using the former for around a decade and I'm very happy with it despite its warts.

[stelcodes]

I agree that there is a large learning curve. It certainly took me a many months to get a good configuration repo going. But I see this as a failure of documentation rather than a failure of NixOS. The way I have my config setup is really not complicated, but it took so long to figure out the design. I really want to write a blog post series about how I do NixOS because I highly value simplicity and I think there are too many NixOS “learning” resources that are written by and for highly technical NixOS gurus. NixPills is a prime example of this. That blog post series is NOT for beginners. At all. But somehow is referenced as a learning resource.

[bbkane]

Is your config on GitHub or are you on Twitter or something? I'd love to see what you came up with. I'd like to try NixOS but I don't have the time/motivation to learn something too complicated

[stelcodes]

My config isn’t open-source just because it’s pretty personal information. You would be able to see every database in my local Postgres instance for example. And every one of my servers. But I do plan on making a open-source version as an example soon. And some blog posts. On twitter I’m https://twitter.com/stelstuff. The blog posts will be on https://stel.codes. GitHub I’m https://github.com/stelcodes

[quyse]

I've also switched from Arch (has been on it for ~10 years) to NixOS (~1 year so far), and fully agree it's amazing.

I've been thinking how interesting it would be to create a user-friendly Linux distribution on top of standard NixOS (similar to what Manjaro is to Arch), which would not require learning Nix language or tinkering with the configs. I mean, system configuration/choosing packages/drivers/kernels should not really require a user to write in Nix language - the sane choices can mostly be represented by a set of GUI checkboxes. There also could be GUI utilities for other Nix goodness, such as creating nix-shells with necessary dependencies available, declaring wrappers for proprietary software, or building temporary VMs. So, I would say, the user absolutely does not need to know a lot about Nix to fully appreciate robustness of NixOS way, and in principle, with the right tools/GUIs it can be very approachable for even non-technical users - it's just that user friendliness seemingly has not been a priority so far.

[stelcodes]

Ive thought about this too! That seems totally possible. I think that’s such a great idea. It could truly bring Linux to the masses!