Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

  • Leaflet
    5•1 year ago

    Agreed, Silverblue is great. I would love a declarative system, but Nix just doesn’t make it easy with its sprawling documentation and mix of new and old parts. I was trying to follow a guide for Home Manager, but couldn’t use it because they were using flakes, I was still on the “old” configuration.nix style.

    You can’t make all things declarative either. If I can only have things 50% declarative, it kinda defeats the point.

    I also still tried to use flatpaks since nix doesn’t have sandboxing and is slower on updates, but its font configuration was broken.

    Nix overall feels like it’s requires a lot of workarounds, moreso than Silverblue.

    But hey, at least if I ever want to try it out again, I just need to copy in my configuration.nix and make things work from there.

    • @PainInTheAES
      2•1 year ago

      Yup, I did the same thing. I really wanted to make it work but I think it just needs some time to mature. Once it has some clean documentation and polishing it’ll be really cool.

      I really liked how NixOS has a hardware config repo. I have a Framework, used the config, and everything just worked. I mean it usually does on other distros too but it’s nice to know that if there’s a config it’ll be guaranteed to work.

      I’m currently really enjoying kinoite. I think it also has some documentation issues but it’s also not as radically different from your average distro as NixOS…

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Never heard about Silverblue, but you may want look at GNU Guix. It is also a functional package manager and I’ve heard from some people that they liked the guix documentation more (not sure if that’s true). Also it uses scheme for configuration rather than some special-purpose language.