Tried NixOS. As a nonprogrammer, trying to have what I wanted was frustrating. There’s no clear documentation on anything, because everything is experimental. Went back to Arch but will try Guix
Don’t get me wrong Guix is hard too, you’ll have to package things yourself, or use flatpak, or use distrobox or maybe nix itself just to get all the things you need. BUT if you can grasp the language and packaging guidelines, it’s much more clearly laid out. The CLI tools are clearer, the methods are too. It’s not this confusing split mess that seems to be with NixOS. And there is still not a clear plasma desktop. But I’m trying to fix that perhaps. 😁
Take a look at the GNU Guix System. It’s similar to NixOS, but maybe their configuration language will be easier.
This. The nix language makes anything bigger harder. A big nix config is just hard to wrangle.
NixOS is style over substance, there is absolutely 0 reason to come with a whole new language for this and Guix is proof of that.
NixOS’ entire project is like this, they make things harder for no other reason than “it looks cooler this way”.
Tried NixOS. As a nonprogrammer, trying to have what I wanted was frustrating. There’s no clear documentation on anything, because everything is experimental. Went back to Arch but will try Guix
Don’t get me wrong Guix is hard too, you’ll have to package things yourself, or use flatpak, or use distrobox or maybe nix itself just to get all the things you need. BUT if you can grasp the language and packaging guidelines, it’s much more clearly laid out. The CLI tools are clearer, the methods are too. It’s not this confusing split mess that seems to be with NixOS. And there is still not a clear plasma desktop. But I’m trying to fix that perhaps. 😁
+1 to Guix, see also: I Love Arch, But GNU Guix Is My New Distro