this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

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[–] JRepin@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried it about a year ago and I don't know it did not convince me. Yeah it might be great for some niche developer oriented needs or deployment but for a normal OS usage, meh. I kind of see it as a current hype, just like crypto/NFT before, and AI now. For normal everyday usage I find openSUSE Tumblweed much more suitable and much more widely applicable.

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[–] TrippyTortuga@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will switch as soon as I can get proprietary Nvidia drivers to work on my laptop.

[–] Speedmaster@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is the main reason I can't use my laptop with linux. It has a 3060 in it. I work as a dev and need to use 2-3 external displays with my laptop. The driver combined with x or wayland is atrocious, I tried 20 distros and I can't get it to work. The saddest thing is that none of the tech is exotic in any way. It's just HDMIs and AOC 24 inch monitors...

[–] TrippyTortuga@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago

To clarify, Manjaro Linux with proprietary drivers works just fine with my 3070m. It's NixOS that doesn't work for some reason.

[–] IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it's different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Overlays. Good package management, and lot of stability stuff.

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.

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[–] authed@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Never tried NixOS but I think I will try Qubes-Whonix next: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes

[–] curtismchale@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've been looking at it after numerous times I update Fedora only to have some tool break that I use daily. Then I spend a chunk of the day getting Virtualbox working again so I can do my job (write code for websites).

I haven't made the jump, but it looks very interesting.

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[–] joshthetechie@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

People love Nix because of the OS configuration based around a single config file. Essentially, you define your system configuration in this file, including installed programs, then you rebuild your system based on that configuration.

The beauty here is that you can easily move this file to another machine running NixOS and reproduce your configuration there. You can also roll back changes by simply rebooting and choosing the last known good build and you're back in business.

[–] hyperspace@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (8 children)

What about Nix's financial issues? Have they been resolved yet?

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[–] torafugu@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't get the hype. I'm staying with Arch, as Nix seems to be mainly for developers.

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[–] joneskind@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t know NixOS. My Linux machine runs Pop_OS and Manjaro.

What are the pros and cons of NixOS ?

[–] 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I'm really not sure of where this would be anymore usefull than a simple bash script to install all packages you need since it doesn't do configs and that rollbacks are supported by some filesystems already. Also Having version specific dependencies is already a thing for flatpacks and such

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[–] JSens1998@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, I've never heard of NixOS. Is it suppose to be like blendOS or CurtainOS? A blend of different desktop environments?

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[–] bloodfart@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago

They don’t know about Debian stable.

[–] Raphael@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're not but nixos users are REALLY loud, as in, they can't spend a single day without talking about it.

New Arch. Both still worse than Silverblue.

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Agreed, Silverblue is great. I would love a declarative system, but Nix just doesn't make it easy with its sprawling documentation and mix of new and old parts. I was trying to follow a guide for Home Manager, but couldn't use it because they were using flakes, I was still on the "old" configuration.nix style.

You can't make all things declarative either. If I can only have things 50% declarative, it kinda defeats the point.

I also still tried to use flatpaks since nix doesn't have sandboxing and is slower on updates, but its font configuration was broken.

Nix overall feels like it's requires a lot of workarounds, moreso than Silverblue.

But hey, at least if I ever want to try it out again, I just need to copy in my configuration.nix and make things work from there.

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