Nixos has been extremely easy to get working for most stuff. If you stray off the trail at all, it gets complicated. Possible! But complicated for my little brain.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Development seems to be a bit of bite in the ass.
Intellij does have a package but for some reason plugins use often some random binaries and those do not work well with nixos.
Also getting always the right dependencies for the current project was for me difficult to learn.
For my dev environment Iβve had great success combining home-manager and their integration with
Sure, it doesnβt quite fit the nix philosophy perfectly, but everything is still in my home.nix file and my home directory, and and I can swap tool versions on the fly and direct IntelliJ to their locations pretty easily
Embrace the --impure
The problem is, no one on Nix is going to stay on the trail. We are all there since we left it long ago.
still weeks ahead of the gentoo user
I had 0 issues with Gentoo.
And it updates in a manner of hours on 3700X (LibreOffice and Firefox are the worst offenders).
Hmmm I was annoyed that my slow internet slowed down my arch update by 6 minutes.
I have very fast internet, so no waiting there.
But fuck LLVM and Clang.
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For everyone who doesn't have several different systems to maintain, I find the advantages of nixOS to be marginal. Sure, you can argue about atomicity and all, but honestly I don't remember ever running into a serious problem with debian either. The huge package repo is nice, but I rarely encounter an app I can't get through apt, flatpak, or as an appimage.
At the same time, nix also has various downsides. Documentation sucks. There are two main ways to manage the system, they both pretend to be the better one, and it's super hard to even get started. That's not an issue with the technology, but just a lack of priority. Guix is much better on that end (but also comes with the same marginal advantages).
On the other hand, debian has a stable community, with proper processes, democratic structures etc.
This is a nice, kind of old presentation from debconf, where people discussed nix and how this could be useful in a debian context as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGrcLEweglg
So, if you FOMO, don't worry. Debian and other options have this on the radar and have their ways to adapt (even if slowly)
Personally Iβve found the transition to be much more than marginal. Systems are defined not by the state of the machine itself but by the config describing it which is much more transparent and manageable. Non-declarative systems are great if youβre just running small services, are changing and experimenting a lot. Or just donβt canβt if your system goes down or bloats over the year. Declarative systems save you whole lot of management headaches especially if you are working with others, or arenβt constantly reviewing your old work.
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How about installing nix on Gentoo?
There are people in your life who care about you too much to let you do that to yourself... I assume...
Everything has to be compiled on Gentoo, right? So would the many binary nix packages even work?
Sure, binary packages always worked on Genoo. Binary packages are the result of compiling.
By now you can freely mix and match precompiled binary packages and selfcompiled packages on Gentoo.
As nix is also a source based package manager, you can also just disable the binary caches and have everything compile on machine! I don't think you would get of the benefits of compiling it for your hardware though due to the sandboxing of the build environment.
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Linux From Scratch says hello
I just read your comment without realizing my keyboard's autocorrect mistake and was super confused. lmao.
I was afraid of that. Glad you figured it out! Maybe I shouldβve quoted itβ¦
Fond memories of Linux From Scratch, here.
...fond memories?
I actually did attempt LFS about 15 years or so ago. I was actually quite proud to reach a usable CLI that I did myself. I promptly reinstalled Ubuntu once I got there because I was in college and needed to write a paper that was due in a few days.
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Gentoo is awesome, especially if you are a developer. Every toolchain at your fingertips. Easy full stack debugging!
Real masochists: CubeOS
For Steam games.
Who hurt you?
I keep telling myself that one of these days, surely, I'll eventually leave my comfy Fedora rpm-ostree setup, try out NixOS, and make the most of its super unique package management.
Surely.
Bad time to try out NixOS due to recent controversy..
Huh?
The entire moderator team just resigned
Why?
Guy on the steering committee is US military employee or something, worries of fascist intervention in the future
Problems between them and the steering committee, there is a post about it on their discourse
Can't an os not have controversy
FOR FIVE MINUTES?
NixOS is the worst offender ngl when it comes to controversy
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I actually just made that exact switch this year. Itβs actually pretty fun to try out lots of folksβ shared setups without worry. (Ended up basing my system off this one https://github.com/Frost-Phoenix/nixos-config)
You forgot secret option 3 - I use arch btw
I am seriously considering switching to either Gentoo or 9front...
Switch to 9front, 9front, 9front!
Damn, it looks like everyone whom I told about this just wants to see me suffer. Alrighty then, see ya in... sometime. The journey sure looks rough, given that my hardware is barely supported by linux, nevermind an experimental OS from the 90s...
I've always liked the idea of running Plan 9. I haven't had the courage to try it out though.
Gentoo isn't so bad if you're good at reading instructions and value control and customization
Same masochism that made me a programmer...
Do a better on Linux from Scratch
NixOS is only bad when you learn to fly, mostly because not enough docs. But when you are all bruised up, it's a joy through and through.
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