I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I’m happy with it so far.
Why did I switch?
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Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it’ll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.
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Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it’s around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.
Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?
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Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.
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Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It’s harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn’t a big issue for me most of the time.)
For now, I’ll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.
My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it’s probably not suitable for most.
data intensive
I take it you weren’t using flakes?
I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.
There are many ways to answer this question and vica versa you can oppose all of them with many more, just select something that fits you
I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies
That really depends on what kind of computer you are using and how fast your internet connection is. Also a desktop computer should be (for most people) as little maintanance work as possible and having long update/install times really stands in the way of that.
It has to be! No one can hate themselves so much they deliberately go out of their way to use something needlessly slow
I dispute the needlessly part. NixOS unstable has very new packages, do you’re getting some fresh updates before some other packaging systems.
Is it less “efficient” than waiting for major versions? Of course. But I’m willing to run an update in the background on my desktop to get that new software.
You might be interested in trying Gentoo, which is what I use. The package manager is definitely not fast, but it is very powerful. You get a lot of NixOS-like powers, but it integrates seamlessly into the unix eco-system without NixOS’ overhead or its unorthodox approach that causes trouble sometimes. It also has first class support for compiler optimizations and global management of compile flags for packages.
So yeah, updates will not be fast at all, but the rest I think you’ll enjoy.
I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I’m afraid it’ll compile for many days 😅
A laptop with 8 GB of ram and 6 cores. I have only one machine that I use for work. That’s the main issueI. Need to find a free weekend to compile and try out gentoo 😅
fwiw I really like nixOS. I like its ambitious approach. But I think it’s unorthodox approach is bound to cause issues. Most software has FHS and a typical Linux system in mind, and while nix solves those problems for most of them, there will always be something weird there.
