I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I’m happy with it so far.
Why did I switch?
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Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it’ll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.
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Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it’s around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.
Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?
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Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.
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Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It’s harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn’t a big issue for me most of the time.)
For now, I’ll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.
My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it’s probably not suitable for most.
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Nix has a great potential as a replacement for flatpak actually as it is source based. You can guarantee what you are installing is based on which source code by compiling yourself.
Flatpak and the others are packaged by upstream. A developer can put malware in a package and upload it to flathub. That’s why it needs permission management, sandboxing etc to minimize the risk.
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Haha yeah. Flatpak is pretty much like having 2 linux systems on your machine at once. And of course it can be worse sometimes.
That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.
Yeah there’s a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.
In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a “fresh install” on every reboot.
data intensive
I take it you weren’t using flakes?
I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it’s data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it’s hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It’ll download all packages again even though there’s minimal change.
I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies
That really depends on what kind of computer you are using and how fast your internet connection is. Also a desktop computer should be (for most people) as little maintanance work as possible and having long update/install times really stands in the way of that.
Why? If it’s installing singing in the background it’s not stopping me from doing my work
Is this sarcasm?
It has to be! No one can hate themselves so much they deliberately go out of their way to use something needlessly slow
I dispute the needlessly part. NixOS unstable has very new packages, do you’re getting some fresh updates before some other packaging systems.
Is it less “efficient” than waiting for major versions? Of course. But I’m willing to run an update in the background on my desktop to get that new software.
In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.
Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It’s just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.
yeah that’s currently in the works (ca-derivations)
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Are there any tradeoffs I need to accept to use this?
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Thanks a lot. I will give it a try. By the way, are you also using the NUR? Do you maybe know if I can configure the
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I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.
Interesting! Any reason for this choice instead of doing everything through nix?
Could you also share the differences you perceived between Arch and Void ?
Void feel faster on old hardware due to systemd missing, the real problem is no-AUR imo.
Benefit. If you never used AUR before and never felt the need to use it.
I don’t need a lot from the AUR, but a few packages I can’t dl without. Tbf those would be in the official repos in other distros like fedora. I’ve got some weird bugs with fedora though. I just use endeavourOS cause it’s so hassle free. One of the best distros period.
I love EndeavorOS. It is basically just Arch plus 20 packages but it makes such a difference.
I know you haven’t used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?
I’m asking because I’m using an arch based distro, but I’ve been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they’re worth trying.
Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.
Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.
I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.
Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.
edit: this isn’t arguing against him, i’ve heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.
You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?
What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?
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Wat? I wasn’t attacking him, I was telling my experience.
He is assuming that you are trying to win an argument and seeing your strategic approach to doing so. It is kind of implied that you want to win the argument without having to defend your position or even be right.
I did not get that from your comment. It felt like you were more genuinely surprised to see others relating experiences you have not had. I have left very similar comments myself.
It sucks that the Internet makes us instantly distrust each other.
