Comment by bigyabai
18 hours ago
NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.
It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.
I also have the same Arch install from 2014 on my main hardware. Each replacement computer is nothing more then taking the old drive out, placing it into an USB enclosure, booting a USB live, setting up the partitions on the new drive, and _rsync_ the content from the old to the new, finalizing with registering the UEFI boot loader.
One just need to make sure that you use the proper _rsync_ command options to preserve hard links or files will be duplicated.
I've heard of people doing this and I'm really interested in this. Can you recommend a write up on this or further reading?
I personally remember being inspired by Erase your Darlings and Paranoid NixOS Setup back in the day, less for the hardening measures and more because of how great the Nix syntax looked. Huge, monumental ass-pain setups could be scripted away in one or two lines like it was nothing. You could create wildly optimized configurations for your specific use-case, and then divide them into modules so they're portable.
It's not advisable to switch to one of these paranoid configurations outright, but they're a great introduction to the flexibility provided by the NixOS configuration system. I'd also recommend Xe's documentation of Nix Flakes, which can be used on any UNIX-like system including macOS: https://xeiaso.net/blog/nix-flakes-1-2022-02-21/
https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/
For what it's worth: I no longer suggest the use of NixOS for any purpose. I only have one NixOS system in my house because it's my NAS and I am a coward.
2 replies →
Do you have a solution for keeping files? Or are you all in the cloud?
As a counter point I had the same arch install from 2014 until 2024, when I switched to NixOS