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by schindlabua 82 days ago
I've been using apt for 20 years too and was never a fan of it, canonical repos are never up-to-date and managing ppas is a pain. Yes I'm very hype about nixOS (and that's a rare thing for me), but it is just really really good.

I understand that "just check it out" is not the best advice because the setup cost to using nixOS is really high, and the learning curve is really steep, so it's not like you can give it a whirl for a few hours to experience the workflow. But believe me, once you are used to it, it just so so much more convenient. I'm currently managing my dev laptop, home PC, a WSL, and a hetzner server all in the same repository (allowing for a lot of code reuse). Everything is super orderly and split into modules, everything is declarative, I can roll back to a previous build of my system if I mess up installing nvidia drivers or iwd or bluetooth etc.

It's also not like installing software is harder than with apt (oftentimes it is easer, `programs.firefox.enable = true`) so after you've paid the setup cost there is just no downside. It's a bit like react vs jQuery, or Kubernetes vs hand-written deployment scripts.