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.
I know you haven’t used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?
I’m asking because I’m using an arch based distro, but I’ve been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they’re worth trying.
Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.
Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.
I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.
Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.
edit: this isn’t arguing against him, i’ve heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.
You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?
What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?
edit: I do feel norawibb’s point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.
🎉 Same! I’ve been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.
Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS’s, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
For reproducible configuration in the Arch world, there’s a project which always looks good to me: aconfmgr
https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr
I think Arch+aconfmgr+yadm+btrfs == a pretty solid arrangement.
Though I’m of course itching for first class Bcachefs support…
My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I’m forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.
Cool that you mention also the other contender OS in that regard. Interestingly you both chose Void as your comparison…I would be curious to why? @7ai@sh.itjust.works
I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it’s new and an independent distro. I’ll try the other two some day.
I sense a dislike for systemd. :D Actually didn’t know alpine is gentoo based. Thanks for your insight.
I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?
When you have full system crashes there is a very high chance it’s the graphics drivers, journalctl -b -1 might show some information why it crashes, as it’s often just the graphics output that freezes, not the rest of the system.
Another common form of crashing is just running out of memory. Linux still handles that not well at all and will just freeze for a long long long time (SysRq-F will invoke the OOM killer, which can often help and speed up the process dramatically, there are other workaround like earlyoom).
That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.
