[AyanamiKaine]

I really love NixOS for my two devices, one surface laptop (lol), and my nvidia pc. It reduced my headaches with drivers so much.

Before updating my nvidia driver or something related to my surface I was scared to break something. With NixOS I can just go back to the old working config.

Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

[tombert]

Yep, exactly the same experience as me. The fact that everything is declarative and revertible means that I'm much "braver" than I would be with virtually any other Linux.

An example I have given before, but there was a weird quirk with my ThinkPad with Linux, where with USB keyboards, if I hadn't been typing for more than a minute, it would have to "wake up" for about four seconds, so I'd lose the first couple words that I was typing.

Fixing this involved playing with a few boot parameters, which can be scary to play with on something like Ubuntu. The issue is annoying, but nothing I can't live with, so if I were on Ubuntu or something I probably would have just tried to live with it, but because it's NixOS, I realized that the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation, so I did a few experiments with boot parameters and fixed it.

[tryfinally]

I've ditched M$, switched to NixOS last month and I feel like I don't hate computers again. Shouldn't have procrastinated this for so long. All other operating systems feel so silly to use now (at least when they aren't anxiety- and rage-inducing).

[craftkiller]

> Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

And similarly, you can generate a bootable ISO of your NixOS config. It's really nice for both testing things out and also as a recovery mechanism. Rather than booting some generic ISO, connecting to the internet, installing whatever recovery tools and filesystem drivers I need, and then doing the recovery, I can boot an ISO that is identical to my main system, with all my favorite recovery tools pre-installed.

[AyanamiKaine]

Ohh I didnt know that, but it makes sense that you would be able to create an ISO, good tip!

[yesbabyyes]

You can similarly create a docker image from a nix config. It's quite beautiful, nix is impressive.

[anon291]

I self host my own stuff in a data center with a bunch of computers. I have a virtualized setup all in nix defining nixos setups for all hosts. Switches are virtualized using open v switch and everything is made so that the nix expression generates a launch script to test the whole set up.

Before I deploy I know that all hosts will be able to boot properly from tftp and then communicate and launch kubernetes.

I never ssh into any of my nodes at this point. Amazing. It just works. Once in a while I'll restart them just for funsies.

[hju22_-3]

That sounds fascinating. Do you have public facing configuration you would be willing to share? :)

[anon291]

It's a bit messy and gives away too many details of my setup (including IP addresses and such). I'll see if I can eventually release something like it. I've thought of developing a tool that lets you auto-generate network topologies and such. My main use case is testing failovers with switches.