this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Why NixOS? I've been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?
I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt't yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.
By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.
My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.
I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.
On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of
/persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they're pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.
Oh, and nixos's packaging story is much more convenient than Debian's (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).
Thank you. Glad I'm not alone in this quest with that kind of history.
My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.
Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container "sees" is the directory I give it.
I've made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there's too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.
The "fresh paint smell" experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.
At the moment I'm exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I'm still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.
I'll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.
Much obliged for sharing your experience!
Not the guy who first commented, but NixOS is fun because you can have the whole config in a git repo, and can easily reproduce. Main drawback is that Nix as a language is insane and that a lot of packages still aren’t available
While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.
As for packages... nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven't found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.