Comment by autra
4 days ago
To counterpoint this, I'm an happy nixos desktop user. It's not perfect, but still vastly better than a non declarative distro for my taste.
4 days ago
To counterpoint this, I'm an happy nixos desktop user. It's not perfect, but still vastly better than a non declarative distro for my taste.
Wholeheartedly agree.
NixOS gave me back my desire to customise my Linux again. I’ve run Linux since 1997; I’ve run a lot of distros.
Having to reconfigure my Linux on every hardware reset (1-2 years apart) just exhausted me to a point where I ran GNOME on Ubuntu so I wouldn’t waste time on one-off stuff.
My .emacs and .vimrc shrunk to 10% so I could reproduce them from memory if I had to.
With NixOS, installing a new machine and having it work exactly like all my machines is minutes of work.
I’ll never lose my hyper-customised setup again.
Running something like Arch or Artix again feels very much like losing my “save” button.
Seconded. I switched to NixOS a year ago after an apt install broke my system one too many times, and so far I've been very very happy with it. I've broken things, but being able to roll back to an exact duplicate of the previous state has been a lifesaver. I can't imagine wanting to go back to repairing broken apt installs.
This is very curious to me as someone who has used Debian based distros almost exclusively for essentially 20+ years (earlier on was mostly Ubuntu, now just vanilla Debian ever since the whole Snap situation) on all of my servers, VMs, containers, and various desktops. To my memory I’ve never had to fix a system due to a broken apt install, certainly not enough times to be so frustrated as to move to another distribution. On top of that, nowadays I have things configured so a new BTRFS snapshot is created on any apt install/upgrade commands so I can just rollback to the previous snapshot if I did run into any issues, which I haven’t ever needed to do. Though that seems to solve the same issue that rolling back in nix does?
I absolutely believe you’ve had this problem, but I’m struggling to understand the issue you’re describing. How exactly is an apt install breaking your whole system? I don’t even really understand how an apt install could break an entire system rather than just failing to install the package. Did you mean to say dist-upgrade or something? Are you using Debian or a downstream distribution? If Debian, are you running Sid or is this happening on unstable/stable? I’m just really curious about this situation.