I was thinking about going immutable for a long time and now I’m choosing a distro to hop to.
My question is: what are good immutable distros other than Fedora Silverblue spins, UBlue family and NixOS?
Maybe someone uses/used any? What is/was your experience with it?
Don’t use NixOS.
Source:
- I love NixOS
- I use it as my daily driver on multiple machines.
- I’ve contributed both to NixOS and surrounding ecosystem.
Evidence:
- Learning cliff rather than curve because:
- The state of the documentation should have been unacceptable a decade ago. Very unacceptable now.
- The tooling is also over a decade behind.
- Governance leaves a lot to be desired.
These things are getting better but not fast enough that I’d recommend it.
If you really want to look into nix, use it on another distro and see if you’re still interested after getting a flake-based devshell together. (impossible challenge: do it for a python project that relies on complex dependencies like transformers)
Governance leaves a lot to be desired.
Genuine question from somebody who’s out of the loop and doesn’t use NixOS: How does this affect your day to day using the distro?
I’ve just switched my secondary machine to Nix, and was in the process of switching my main too, so it really is quite a shame. I’m really enjoying the distribution, but if the organization continues to have colossal government issues, and repelling active packagers, that’s really not a good sign
Now that I’m deep in it with flakes + home manager + impermanence + disko/nixos-anywhere, it’s fantastic having this much control and stability on all my systems, and I’m excited to start switching as much of my homelab as I can over to NixOS like my workstations.
But I totally agree, I would not recommend this to anyone who is not super interested in it.
