Comment by AyanamiKaine

4 hours ago

I really love NixOS for my two devices, one surface laptop (lol), and my nvidia pc. It reduced my headaches with drivers so much.

Before updating my nvidia driver or something related to my surface I was scared to break something. With NixOS I can just go back to the old working config.

Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

5 comments

AyanamiKaine

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tombert  3 hours ago

Yep, exactly the same experience as me. The fact that everything is declarative and revertible means that I'm much "braver" than I would be with virtually any other Linux.

An example I have given before, but there was a weird quirk with my ThinkPad with Linux, where with USB keyboards, if I hadn't been typing for more than a minute, it would have to "wake up" for about four seconds, so I'd lose the first couple words that I was typing.

Fixing this involved playing with a few boot parameters, which can be scary to play with on something like Ubuntu. The issue is annoying, but nothing I can't live with, so if I were on Ubuntu or something I probably would have just tried to live with it, but because it's NixOS, I realized that the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation, so I did a few experiments with boot parameters and fixed it.

tryfinally  3 hours ago

I've ditched M$, switched to NixOS last month and I feel like I don't hate computers again. Shouldn't have procrastinated this for so long. All other operating systems feel so silly to use now (at least when they aren't anxiety- and rage-inducing).

craftkiller  1 hour ago

> Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

And similarly, you can generate a bootable ISO of your NixOS config. It's really nice for both testing things out and also as a recovery mechanism. Rather than booting some generic ISO, connecting to the internet, installing whatever recovery tools and filesystem drivers I need, and then doing the recovery, I can boot an ISO that is identical to my main system, with all my favorite recovery tools pre-installed.