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by tim-projects 6 days ago
> Ultra lightweight

Doesn't nixos use a lot more diskspace than arch, because of its store?

1 comments

It seems like the "lightweight" they seem to be concerned with is RAM, not disc. I can't really comment on disc space usage on my own NixOS system, though my "thin client" skin does fit nicely on an old Chromebook, I think that guy has 32GB of storage.
OTOH I have an ex Chromebook with 16G of storage that I meant to run NixOS until I discovered the initial install needed almost half the disk so I figured it was doomed the moment I tried to update while also having some space used in home. It runs Alpine now, very comfortably.
I’ll just say as nix Darwin user the default vanilla install does not garbage collect well and every 2 months or so I have to hack around nuking shit in my system to free up space. Maybe NixOS itself is better managed and it’s an idiosyncrasy of nix-Darwin. Maybe not
I like the sound of nix but the disk space issue is a deal breaker for me - my sdd is always full.

I run my main arch system in under 6GB. That's enough for qemu and wine and a few other bits which is all I need - the rest is in VMs

Would like to switch it to nix though..

I think, like everything with Nix, if you recite the correct incantation for configuration you can avoid this issue. But it’s not default behavior