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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.
One year approximatively. But I elaborate a bit, I installed the minimal version, because I use bspwm. I had issues since the tty log in. Probably the xfce iso is OK.
In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.
Also this in your configure.nix:
nix.registry = {
nixpkgs = {
from = {
type = "indirect";
id = "nixpkgs";
};
to = {
type = "path";
path = inputs.nixpkgs.outPath;
};
};
};
This will create an entry in the nix registry pointing to your currently installed version and stop nix search from constantly updating the package list.
No, it just makes the nix command use the same nixpkgs repository your system is already using. Without it nix will constantly redownload the latest nixpkgs-unstable which is very slow. You will get slightly older software when you do something like nix run nixpkgs#blender (“old” here meaning the same version as if you had it installed on your current system), but if you just want to try something out, you probably care more about it being fast than the latest version.
And if you care about lastest stuff you’ll can just make yourself a nixpkgs-unstable registry entry with:
nix registry add flake:unstable github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable
and than do:
nix run nixpkgs-unstable#blender
Updating your OS isn’t impacted by any of this at all, as that happens via the /etc/nixos/flake.lock file as before.
PS: This assumes you are using flakes and the new nix command, both of which are still marked as experiment and not enabled the default.
Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It’s just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.
Does Nix have Guix-style grafts? I know that in theory that is how Guix lessens the minor-update-to-core dependency problem. But I only use Guix for dev environments so I don’t know how well it works in practice.
Nix doesn’t support that officially, there is replace-dependency, but it’s not in common use:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Documentation_Gaps#Does_nix_support_binary_grafting_like_guix.3F
There is also patchelf to adjust the RPATH and other stuff backed into compiled binaries, which is in common use, but not for patching.
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.
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.
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 😅
