NixOS has been my daily driver for gaming, code experiments and general productivity for about a year and a half now. I’ve been using desktop Linux in varying ways for 20+ years, and while there are certainly downsides/tradeoffs, I don’t see myself leaving NixOS anytime soon.
I’d been curious about it many times in the past, but found the learning curve to be prohibitive the first several times I tried it. I’m fairly convinced that many of the problems people experience stem from the poor documentation and over-enthusiastic community extolling the virtues of Flakes and Home Manager.
I understand their value and why people like using them, but for a beginner, those capabilities just layer complexity on top of something that already feels unfamiliar, and make it impossible to figure out which thing isn’t working when things go wrong. When I went to a very Vanilla NixOS configuration as a starting point, everything clicked and I was able to build up a solid desktop environment incrementally.
As a tinkerer, the killer feature for me is the ease of experimenting with packages/whole configurations and then reverting back to my known good config. Type `nix-shell -p <package>` and the package is ready for use, and totally gone when I exit the shell.
I don’t think need is the right way to describe my relationship with NixOS as a desktop. But decades of experience dealing with the aftermath of installing/experimenting/tweaking my environment in traditional distros sure makes me appreciate how much easier it can be.
> I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop.
NixOS on the desktop isn’t targeted at the average person, or probably even the average Linux desktop user. If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice. But I think that will be a very individual/personal calculation.
It has been my daily driver for coding, gaming and writing for 14 months now. I have also been using Linux since the late 1990s, and I really value the 100s of hours I've poured into NixOS to make my machines work the same between reinstalls.
I started on a work laptop, and moved the configuration to my home desktop; it instantly worked the same way. I copied the configuration to my gaming laptop, and when my desktop broke down, I could continue to use my gaming laptop as if it were the same computer.
Being able to copy-paste a few snippets and have Steam working was amazing.
> If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice.
It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.
But NixOS has a way of converting all your regular problems into Nix problems.
Here I am, trying to get back into Kubernetes.
But all I can focus on is how to install Kubernetes.
> It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.
My middle ground approach has been to use containers and fall back to a more traditional Linux approach within those containers when I don’t want to be bothered (or just don’t need) to figure out the Nix Way.
If it’s something that’s core to my daily setup, I’ll still invest the time to bake it into my NixOS config, but using fallbacks like this has been a good middle ground for me that allows me to take advantage of the best parts of NixOS without adding undue pain when spinning up experiments.
Even running containers is a Nix adventure in NixOS. Who needs docker-build when you have pkgs.dockerTools? Who needs docker-run when you have config.containers? Wait, you can also use nixos-container CLI, or embed your container in a systemd process. And so on. It never ends.
I use nixOS, do a ton of container development, and have never had issues or been confused about containers? I have two lines that enable docker in my nix config:
Since then, docker's been completely seamless. How far into kubernetes have you gone before? I'm a little confused about what you mean by "Install kubernetes". I used to use minikube but now use k3d, and those were both just packages available in nixpkgs. K8s (especially local k8s) is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but not because of NixOS
I’d been curious about it many times in the past, but found the learning curve to be prohibitive the first several times I tried it. I’m fairly convinced that many of the problems people experience stem from the poor documentation and over-enthusiastic community extolling the virtues of Flakes and Home Manager.
I understand their value and why people like using them, but for a beginner, those capabilities just layer complexity on top of something that already feels unfamiliar, and make it impossible to figure out which thing isn’t working when things go wrong. When I went to a very Vanilla NixOS configuration as a starting point, everything clicked and I was able to build up a solid desktop environment incrementally.
As a tinkerer, the killer feature for me is the ease of experimenting with packages/whole configurations and then reverting back to my known good config. Type `nix-shell -p <package>` and the package is ready for use, and totally gone when I exit the shell.
I don’t think need is the right way to describe my relationship with NixOS as a desktop. But decades of experience dealing with the aftermath of installing/experimenting/tweaking my environment in traditional distros sure makes me appreciate how much easier it can be.
> I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop.
NixOS on the desktop isn’t targeted at the average person, or probably even the average Linux desktop user. If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice. But I think that will be a very individual/personal calculation.