Last time I didn’t upgrade for a long while some drivers broke, maybe I’ll just switch to NixOS this time since it seems interesting. Does anyone here use NixOS? What do you think about it?

  • jaykstah@waveform.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve gone like 5 moths without updating a laptop on Arch before and the only thing I had to deal with was updating keyring first

  • mrh@mander.xyz
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve never used Arch or Nix, but I switched from Void -> Guix and have been very happy with it. It’s such a huge peace of mind to be able to have your whole system declaratively configured, package changes being atomic and generational (rollbacks so no worries about breakage), Guix shell for messing about, and being able to make your system do anything you can write in Scheme.

    That’s my daily driver. On servers so far I’ve gone with Debian Stable + Guix.

    Also Void is still a fantastic distro, and is what I would use if not for Guix/Nix.

      • mrh@mander.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        guix pull && guix upgrade is still a bit slow, but I never thought excessively slow (definitely slower than xbps, pacman, and probably apt too).

        I guess I never thought much about it because of rollbacks, so it’s safe enough to just cron.

  • runawaycorvid@rammy.site
    0·
    1 year ago

    (Disclaimer that I’m still new-ish to Linux)

    I just went about a year between EndeavorOS updates on a laptop and uhh… it wasn’t happy. I just installed Kubuntu which hopefully will be more forgiving haha.

    • happyhippo@feddit.it
      0·
      1 year ago

      I don’t get why so many folks try niche stuff when the tried and proven solution is out there.

      Tumbleweed, excellent support for KDE, rolling, great defaults, snapshots out of the box, lots of support/documentation, OBS…

  • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    NixOS + Home Manager user here.

    I run in an opt-in state config. / is tmpfs. /home is tmpfs. /boot and /nix are real filesystems. At boot, the EFI loader reads the configuration from /nix/persist/etc/nixos/flake.nix, symlinks all the programs and configs into / and /home, and startup proceeds as normal.

    That means nothing persists across boots unless I add it to my config. Cruft doesn’t accumulate in hidden areas, it’s all in my config. That keeps things fast, makes management easier, and makes troubleshooting easier.

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      The more I see about NixOS, the less I understand it.

      Is it a pain in the ass to use on a daily basis? It just seems like one of those things where the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

      • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        Daily use isn’t difficult IME. NixOS is just so nice once it’s working. It’s ridiculously easy to understand your system & how it’s set up (it’s all in your config). Nothing changes between updates that you don’t know about. You never have to merge configurations from upstream. It’s trivial to try something new without changing your system overall. Rollbacks are amazing. It’s easy to configure a new machine, to keep multiple machines synchronized (same packages & versions & even users & dotfiles). I have automatic updates enabled so I get a new system when I reboot, and if I don’t like an update I can just revert seamlessly. It basically works like an appliance: I don’t have to think about the way it’s set up unless I disagree with the defaults, and in that case I can change them. You can always override things, even down to applying patches to source code (though obviously that then requires re-compiling). It’s like if you took the stability of Debian, the up-to-date nature and huge repo of Arch & the AUR, and the configurability of Gentoo and mashed them all together.

        The hard bits are packaging new programs and making “modules”. You can pretty much always configure a program by just writing the config file options in a Nix string block, e.g. I’ve got the following in my home-manager config for my ~/.xkbrc:

          home.file.".config/kxkbrc" = {
    text = ''
      [$Version]
      update_info=kxkb_variants.upd:split-variants

      [Layout]
      DisplayNames=
      LayoutList=us
      LayoutLoopCount=-1
      Model=pc86
      Options=terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,compose:rctrl
      ResetOldOptions=true
      SwitchMode=Global
      Use=true
      VariantList=colemak
    '';
  };

        Modules would let that be a Nix expression, e.g. looking like

        programs.xkeyboard = {
  layout = "us";
  variant = "colemak";
  model = "pc86";
  options = {
    terminate = "ctrl_alt_bksp";
    compose = "rctrl";
  };
  resetOldOptions = true;
};

        but that requires writing an expression in Nix that converts the Nix syntax into whatever syntax the config file needs to be. That means learning a lot more Nix. Packaging programs also requires learning more Nix, and particularly how Nixpkgs builders work.

        That said, the documentation is shitty, the error messages are shitty, Flakes are massively easier to work with but still “experimental” and lots of the docs & examples online are for pre-flakes, while nixpkgs is enormous it doesn’t have everything, and IDE support for Nix shell environments is lacking (have to use VS Code or a terminal-based editor like nvim).

        Nix is sort of like democracy. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Nix is the worst way to manage an OS, except for all the others. It’s shitty, but it’s shitty in different ways and those mostly end up making day-to-day operations easier.

  • [TK] Trainzkid@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got an Arch server that I update monthly (and have been for 2+ years now), and a desktop that I update maybe 2-3 times a week. I’ve not had any issues, so long as I update the keyring first. Good luck!!