I’ve been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn’t see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.

So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I’m still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.

It’s clear that I’m missing something so please help me understand what it is.

Edit: Thank you to everyone in this great community! It’s always so nice to have a constructive and sane discussion.
After reading so many comments, they all confirm what I’ve read before and I may realize that my real problem is already having a stable system and no need for the great NixOS options that are very neat but would not benefit my specific and simplistic needs. That being said I can’t refrain myself from being curious and will continue testing NixOS.

The need for only 2 config files is the top of the iceberg but hiding more complex configuration to rely on. Not that I really have too much spare time but I do enjoy learning and tweaking NixOS. With its current development state, things are changing a lot so it can keep me busy for months. That’s probably what I was mostly looking for: another toy to play with.

Along my journey I will learn a lot about NixOS and may find a feature that will motivate my switch to it. Thanks again for all your precious feedback!

I’ll also take this opportunity to share the best help I’ve found so far to start with NixOS: https://github.com/MatthiasBenaets/nixos-config And his 3 hours (!) video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    8·
    10 months ago

    For me it’s the fact that I have one source of truth for my whole system config that I can stick in git

    If I want to clean up software I don’t need anymore I just remove them from the package list and they’re gone next rebuild

    Also means when I reinstall or setup a new system I just run the installer, do a git pull, rebuild and I’ve instantly got all my tools, configured just how I like them

    Also, if I want to make a big change I can build my system in a VM first to make sure it works first (not that I do that because it also lets me revert to an earlier build from grub if I need to)

    I’ve also got both my laptop and my PC on basically identical configurations from the same git repo with each of them having a smaller config file for hardware specific stuff