(2025-08-04) Switched to NixOS: the path of the samurai begins
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I have upgraded the SSD in my ThinkPad, my main x86_64 personal machine. The
new one has a whopping 4 TB of space. And this, as I thought, was the
perfect time to try out something completely new as a daily driver OS. And
by something completely new I meant something not derived from Debian, Arch
or Alpine, and obviously not BSD or Haiku which don't match some of my
requirements, and obviously not anything RPM-based, not Slackware, Guix or
Gobolinux because all of them just suck. As you might have imagined, not so
many based options were left, and I chose the one being praised the most by
hackers alike: NixOS. Is it worth the hype? It's time to find out.
As I just have transferred all my data to this new system and set up the
basics, I won't share my entire opinion at once as it hasn't fully shaped
yet. I'll just say this for now: you have to unlearn a lot of what you have
learned about typical Linux distros. On a flip side, you have to be mindful
and not forget any minor package that you **might** need at the systemwide
level. Whenever you don't, isolated Nix shells are clearly preferred here.
Of course, some precompiled binaries just don't play ball with this
non-FHS-compatible directory structure, so NixOS offers several mechanisms
to achieve backward compatibility at least to some extent, and I naturally
have enabled all of them that I could find.
Besides keeping the number of packages (relatively) low, I also have realized
something I couldn't realize with more "traditional" package management: in
my personal workflows, a lot is really happening inside the home directory,
not elsewhere in the system. In other words, with some makeshift tooling, I
had constantly tried building the same level of isolation in my Arches that
I'm already given out of the box with the native tooling here. The Nix
language itself is a bit weird but pretty manageable and offers plenty of
flexibility. However, within just two incomplete days of running NixOS, I
already have found several caveats that **might** interfere with my
workflows until I find a workaround. For instance, one cannot just run uv
with a pygame dependency whereas a nix-shell with the same dependency and
the same Python version works as expected. In fact, workarounds are an
organic part of Nix life, and that might pose a problem sometimes. Not one I
couldn't solve, but one that could have been avoided if they just had
provided an "unsafe sandbox" for certain types of software as an option.
Anyway, to me as a power user, the amount of positives still outweighs the
negatives by a large number, so I decided to proceed with walking this path.
And I'll see where it leads me. So, look out for the follow-up posts about
NixOS. And no, I haven't forgotten about the abacus. As always, stay tuned.
