I was using a mix of debian servers, arch thinkpads and macos macbooks at the point where I moved everything to NixOS (macbooks did not survive this transition and were donated due to never working properly because of t2 issues).
Nix is extremely hard. I mean, don’t get me wrong, initial setup is easy, adding and updating packages is the easiest experience between all package managers out there, nixpkgs is overpowered as it has almost all the software that exists since there are no conflicting dependencies in nix. Getting something that is not in nixpkgs to run is impossible for a beginner (nixpkgs has steam-run to partially solve this, but results may vary). Getting to the point where a tornado may pass through your home and destroy all the hardware inside, and the whole recovery process from that point is about 20 minutes of your time, including the trip to the store for new hardware, requires significant effort, both time and mental, that most of us don’t have. But the entire point is that it is possible with Nix!
If Debian is like owning a 90s Corolla, NixOS is like owning a factory that can make any car you like. You can choose to get a 90s Corolla, you can choose to get a newer Corolla, you can skip corollas entirely and make something new and fast. When the new and fast thing breaks, you can make a new car or go back to the Corolla. The Corolla comes completely ready to use by you from the production line. If you need to adjust the mirrors, you just make a new car with the correct mirrors setup. All the cars you make after that will come with the mirrors setup how you like them, because that is now a part of the manufacturing instructions the factory has.
The only caveat is that factory gets updates every 6 months and then your car building pipeline may break when you get the update. In three years I’ve been using nixos fixing those took about 5 minutes and usually boiled down to stuff like ‘previously we had a list of car colors, passed as a string, now the factory expects to get a hex color code’.
Judging by the commit history, I moved most of my machines to NixOS after about 6 months building my config, then, 8 months later I rebuilt the entire thing from scratch when I understood nix enough to make everything truly modular.
I really doubt that once you’ve embraced NixOS you’d be tempted to use anything else or try LFS. NixOS is beautiful. NixOS just works (after 6 months of setup).
Seems like I skipped the whole pipeline amd went straight from Rasbpian to debian :p
I tried a bit of mint but it was too annoying to get something to run and bailed.
I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. It still took me a little bit to go from GNOME to KDE. I would not recommend new Linux users go straight to Debian from their first distro, but I’d been using Ubuntu on and off again since 2012 so when I decided to leave Windows in 2024, I also decided to leave Ubuntu for good and went straight to Debian. The idea that I set it and forget it and never have to worry about it was (and is) so appealing to me.
I’ve considered running Slack on my laptop, though.
The
mint | opensuse | fedora | arch | gentoo | freebsd | openbsd | void | devuan | debianpipeline is real.Maybe nix will pull me from depths of stability soon before I get overconfident, try LFS, and promptly switch to pen & paper.
(Or try bedrock linux and spend rest eternity in the purgatory equivalent of distro-hopping)
I was using a mix of debian servers, arch thinkpads and macos macbooks at the point where I moved everything to NixOS (macbooks did not survive this transition and were donated due to never working properly because of t2 issues).
Nix is extremely hard. I mean, don’t get me wrong, initial setup is easy, adding and updating packages is the easiest experience between all package managers out there, nixpkgs is overpowered as it has almost all the software that exists since there are no conflicting dependencies in nix. Getting something that is not in nixpkgs to run is impossible for a beginner (nixpkgs has steam-run to partially solve this, but results may vary). Getting to the point where a tornado may pass through your home and destroy all the hardware inside, and the whole recovery process from that point is about 20 minutes of your time, including the trip to the store for new hardware, requires significant effort, both time and mental, that most of us don’t have. But the entire point is that it is possible with Nix!
If Debian is like owning a 90s Corolla, NixOS is like owning a factory that can make any car you like. You can choose to get a 90s Corolla, you can choose to get a newer Corolla, you can skip corollas entirely and make something new and fast. When the new and fast thing breaks, you can make a new car or go back to the Corolla. The Corolla comes completely ready to use by you from the production line. If you need to adjust the mirrors, you just make a new car with the correct mirrors setup. All the cars you make after that will come with the mirrors setup how you like them, because that is now a part of the manufacturing instructions the factory has.
The only caveat is that factory gets updates every 6 months and then your car building pipeline may break when you get the update. In three years I’ve been using nixos fixing those took about 5 minutes and usually boiled down to stuff like ‘previously we had a list of car colors, passed as a string, now the factory expects to get a hex color code’.
Judging by the commit history, I moved most of my machines to NixOS after about 6 months building my config, then, 8 months later I rebuilt the entire thing from scratch when I understood nix enough to make everything truly modular.
I really doubt that once you’ve embraced NixOS you’d be tempted to use anything else or try LFS. NixOS is beautiful. NixOS just works (after 6 months of setup).
Seems like I skipped the whole pipeline amd went straight from Rasbpian to debian :p
I tried a bit of mint but it was too annoying to get something to run and bailed.
I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. It still took me a little bit to go from GNOME to KDE. I would not recommend new Linux users go straight to Debian from their first distro, but I’d been using Ubuntu on and off again since 2012 so when I decided to leave Windows in 2024, I also decided to leave Ubuntu for good and went straight to Debian. The idea that I set it and forget it and never have to worry about it was (and is) so appealing to me.
I’ve considered running Slack on my laptop, though.
Seems like I also took the hard route. #YayMe