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by jsilence 1547 days ago
Same here.

Strongly eyeing NixOS and patiently awaiting real work experience from a co-worker who already did the plunge.

4 comments

I jumped in several months ago and haven't really regretted it. The caveat being that you have to be okay with learning Nix (the language), debugging with only arcane error messages to go off of, and reading a lot of the config source because documentation is vast but shallow. If you feel like you're willing to make the tradeoff, then it is a blast and you'll be surprised you ever lived without Nix.

In case you want some inspiration or to take an existing config and run, feel free to take a peek at or use mine: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

Time ago, when OpenSolaris dead I've switched to Ubuntu, until Unity (WM) was there it was good enough, after they took "the enterprise path", I'm on NixOS, there are a bit of annoyances to run unpackaged binaries but the rest work like a charm AND it's fully reproducible AND creating a custom iso is just the config + a oneliner, so deploy a personal desktop/homeserver is as easy as deploy in an enterprise automated infra without the burden of it.

The nix language is indigestible for me, so I eye Guix System but so far Guix does not have things I like/need so still on NixOS in a calm state: systems updated, automated, reproducible without thinking and babysitting them continuously.

It is to operating systems what automatic memory management was to programming. Irrefutably needed.
The analogy is even more apt due to nix basically having a garbage collector (packages no longer available from any installed package, profile)
I got interested in NixOS after watching https://youtu.be/LA8KF9Fs2sk and https://youtu.be/ubDMLoWz76U

I use fedora since long time and so far is quite stable without any non-sense