[codethief]

Ubuntu user of 15 years here (+ a couple years of tinkering with RedHat, Arch & Gentoo before that).

I tried to learn Nix (the language) a couple years ago, didn't like it and got nowhere. Now, two months ago I heard I would be getting a Windows machine at my new client, so I really wanted a way to deterministically generate a Linux VM that worked & felt exactly the same as my usual setup. So I thought back to Nix(OS) and this time I skipped trying to learn Nix and just tried to absorb it from examples and code snippets I would find online (very reminiscent of my experience with Emacs many years ago). Often I would also ask Gemini to explain things to me. Only a few afternoons later I had a working VM[0] that looked and felt exactly as the desktop environment I have carefully curated over 15 years. Now, several weeks later, I also have built a live CD image with that same config and will soon roll out my Nix config to all my Ubuntu machines & Debian servers. I won't look back.

I won't deny, though: I still don't like the language too much and I think it is tied too much to building an OS, as opposed to anything else. Documentation is sparse and mediocre at best. But overall it's alright! Things are usually not that complicated, and most of the time they just work! (And if they don't, it's surprisingly easy to navigate the nixpkgs source code and look up what's happening under the hood.) In any case, my new Nix config is so much better than the set of bespoke Bash scripts I've written over the years to (reproducibly?) configure my Ubuntu desktop with i3wm for me.

[0]: nixos-generators is magical when you first try it! https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators (Fine print: Of course with the benefit of hindsight I now know that it's merely a dumb wrapper around things that Nix provides out of the box but oh well.)

[johntash]

Are you using NixOS, or are you using Nix + home-manager or something like that to manage your user's stuff?

[codethief]

Just NixOS. When building the VM / live CD I copy my dotfiles into the Nix store and then during first boot-up I copy them into my home dir and set up symlinks.

The main reason I decided against home-manager was that it makes my simple symlink setup (~/.foo -> ~/.dotfiles/foo) virtually impossible: Symlinks will always point to the read-only Nix store in one way or another. See https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/3514 or one of the countless other tickets on the topic. Through this episode I also learned that home-manager isn't exactly well-documented, either, and also quite opinionated. (Which, to be fair, is not a bad thing – if it works for you, it probably works great.)

Finally, not using home-manager was also a risk management decision in that it's probably best to not go all-in on Nix, NixOS, home-manager etc. all at once. Start with the simplest possible config that gets you running, then iterate.