I’m currently running Arch and it’s great, but I’m noticing I’m not staying on the ball in regards to updates. I’ve been reading a bit about Nix and NixOS and thinking of trying it as my daily driver. I’ve got a Lenovo x1 xtreme laptop, I don’t do much gaming (except OSRS), use firefox, jetbrains stuff, bitwarden, remmina, obsidian, and docker.
Is anyone running NixOS as their daily? How are you liking it and are there any pitfalls / stuff you wish you knew before?
I’ve been running NixOS for the past four years in all my computers. It’s really, really the end game of Linux distributions for me. But it’s not for everybody. The Nix language can be a tough thing to learn, if you’re not a programmer and haven’t done anything with lazy functional languages before. It’s a dynamic language, with not super great documentation for practical things and missing a good language server that would let you to jump to definitions when learning how nixpkgs work and how to build things.
Also, what I think is a serious problem, is how flakes are not yet enabled in the default installation. So first you learn with the basic template, and some helpful person comes talking about how great flakes are, and in a few weeks you might have written your own system flake finally and got it working. Flakes are really important to understand as soon as possible, because with them you get the lock file that gives you real reproducibility between computers and full control on which version of packages you get.
But, when you learn all that, and get your company to go full-on with nix, having flakes in all projects, it’s the best programmer’s operating system out there. Here’s my config to steal stuff.
Thanks for the config! I’m a developer and that also contributes to my interest - being able to express my configuration like that. Your config is a bit overwhelming, but in a good way, I’ve created a git repo for myself to start off and using yours as a reference since you seem to do a lot of cool shit. Am going to start off with flakes.
Not sure if I’m going to jump in with both feet yet (since apart from my work laptop and servers, this is my only machine) but I am going to journey into writing a conifguration properly and testing it on a VM. Already using nix packages on my Arch install.
I was just going through the README and I’m definitely stealing the idea chowning the /etc/nixos dir and symlinking it to $HOME/.config/nixpkgs. How did I not think of this myself?