Seems like this distro is getting a lot of traction recently. Has anyone tried it? Is it any good?
Yes, and NixOS is the most frustrating Linux distro I ever tried, without a doubt. I love the concept, but the execution is hard. NixOS can’t configure desktop environments, such as Gnome and KDE. NixOS is stable, so NixOS works best in server environments.
But in server environments, tools such as Ansible are orders of magnitudes more comprehensive to everyone who understands the Linux basics. NixOS is therefore dominant in neither desktop nor server environments, but it’s a neat academic project.
I failed to find sources for what I’m about to say, but there was a point where the NixOS stable branch… broke. I’m not sure what went down, but I think that a manual merge train messed smth up. If that’s correct, then NixOS is less stable than Debian.
There’s also the situation where they store the entire package store in Amazon S3 because someone else paid for it. That someone disappeared, and they expect the community to stem the costs now. If they don’t pay up, NixOS stability is once again dead.
I feel like the tooling is all over the place. There are many ways to do one thing, and you never know what’s the right thing to do.
Overall a poor experience. Please correct me if I’m wrong, I didn’t invest much time in this comment.
Being using it for almost 2 years. Was very weird at the beginning because of the “declarative” approach they used. But once you get used to it… Its a life changer.
Declarative? Could you explain?
Oh my bad. Yeah you can configure almost anything in a declarative way on the
/etc/nixos/configuration.nixfile:services.xserver.enable = true; services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;Or
services.xserver = { enable = true; display manager.gdm.enable = true; };You can define a lot more (programs, users) and then you build the config file to take effect. By default NixOS is immutable so you can’t change anything in the root partition and if there is something that broke you can rollback to a previous build!
Your whole system is defined in a file called
configuration.nix. This file describes everything about your system: all packages installed, which Desktop Environment / Window Manager to use, and also configuration for almost everything (e.g. zsh or neovim). When “switching” (which is basically installing/updating the system), Nix looks at the configuration and changes your system according to what you’ve declared in theconfiguration.nix, installing or uninstalling packages for instance.So, the state of your system is “declared” in a single file, which can be tracked in git or backed up wherever. If you have mulitple systems, you can also share parts of your config between them, which makes configuring and customizing stuff a lot easier.
There are a lot of other aspects, but thats the basic gist of it
Is it a big learning curve? Is this the emacs equivalent of OS configuration/installation?
edit: another question - Could I play around with it by installing in qemu and if I like that, take my configuration.nix from qemu and install it as my main OS?
I’d say it’s a pretty steep curve unfortunately, and nixOS is also not perfect, mind you
- The nix language (that is used for the configuration) itself has sometimes weird syntax. It’s also a proper functional programming languages with all bells ans whistles that brings
- The documentation is less than ideal (to put it mildley). Most of the times you need to search reddit (rip) and the forums to find how to do certain things.
- Nix is not FHS
compliant. Basically everything is a symlink to some file in the nix store,
located in
/nix. Packages installed with nix are patched to work that way, but things not installed with it might not run out of the box
As for trying it out, yeah copying the config from the vm should work (except for maybe some hardware-specific stuff). remember to backup your stuff just in case lol
Could I play around with it by installing in qemu and if I like that, take my configuration.nix from qemu and install it as my main OS?
Absolutely. That’s how I got started ;)
If you install Nix (the package manager) on your current system, you can actually directly build a vm from a config file via
nixos-rebuild build-vm.
That sounds really cool… so you could just take that file, do a clean install of nix, then put that file back and it’ll install all your old packages and stuff?
Basically yes
you could also go so far as to wipe your root partition (except for some selected dirs) on every boot, although I don’t do that myself: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
I’ve been using it for around a year and really like it so far. It is however very different from almost every other linux distro, so I would think carefully about it before switching. If you’re not prepared to invest significant time and/or don’t really care about the advantages of NixOS, you should stay away from it.
Pros of NixOS:
- Declarative configuration: This is probably the main selling point. The whole system configuration and installed packages are neatly in one place. Using home-manager, this can also replace config files for many programs. All of this is especially useful if you share that configuration between multiple devices.
- System rollbacks: If something breaks, simply boot into the previous generation.
- Very customizable system: You can freely choose your desktop environment & basic system packages.
Pros of Nix in general (you don’t need to install NixOS for this):
- Huge package repository (also very up-to-date if you want to use the unstable channel)
- Consistent developer environments that can easily be shared
Cons of Nix & NixOS:
- Very steep learning curve: You essentially have to learn (the basics of) the Nix programming language.
- There are often many ways to do things without any clear recommendation: Channels / Flakes, whether nix-env should be used, etc.
- The documentation isn’t always great (although it is improving)
- If something is not packaged in nixpkgs, it can be difficult to run it, since NixOS doesn’t follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. There are some tools to run flatpaks, appimages and arbitrary executables, but especially the later might not always work out of the box.
Thanks for the in-depth review. I think I’ll give it a shot.
Take this with a grain of salt.
I loved using NixOS with flakes, home-manager and custom minimalistic setup with XMonad or Sway. I was also using Nix with direnv whenever I could for my development projects. At the same time I’ve noticed that a lot of my programming focus (and time) was being used by solving niche issues with Nix, packaging things for Nix, suddenly breaking applications (because of upstream changes within nixpkgs). I’ve also had issues with using other ways of providing development environment (npm, pip stuff etc).
I was using unstable channel so breakages part is most likely on me. But apart from that I’m left with the feeling that NixOS is a huge time sink which isn’t necessarily worth it if you aren’t managing a whole fleet of machines.
Nowadays I am happy not using Nix at all. My development needs are fullfilled by what is available via dnf (Fedora package manager) and npm. I also use podman containers and flatpak a lot more since I’ve switched to Silverblue.
NixOS: The Most Over-Engineered Linux Distribution
