Hey all, thought this might be of interest to some here.
Wrote about why I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu after using it for several months on my daily driver. Suspect that this take is likely to be kind of controversial and court claims of skill issues, which might even be true.
Let me know what you think.
Damn I was considering switching to Nix because I was annoyed at fl studio and various other kinda niche stuff breaking all the time. This has made me seriously reconsider.
More serious than this is the rare occasions Nix packages conflict with each other. While Nix separates dependencies, it doesn’t separate them as absolutely as a full container system like Docker. Therefore it is possible, albeit unlikely, to end up with conflicts between versions of installed libraries.
Never tried it but thanks for dispelling the hype. What a meme OS.
I like reading about OS journeys like these. Personally I ended up living with immutable fedora despite of its endless challenges, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to mutable linux for my dev laptop. I feel immutability is a shield against change over time.
Yes and no. It depends on what your aim is. I LOVE Nix and it runs like a beast on my ZBook. But I’m after reproducible environments I can just blast around on all over the place without a heavy imagining solution. Works great for that.
Does it take some time to setup as a daily driver? Yes. But no more than Arch. But the thing with Nix is if you already have a robust config, it takes less time than Arch to go from zero to stomping out code.
Ubuntu is a great generic distro. But I find Nix gives me oomph. As with everything in this ecosphere…use what works for YOU! 😁
I really don’t get it, I moved to NixOS some years ago. Okay, first few months I had to fiddle with configurations and add some packages that were missing. Everything past those early months was a blast.
Replacing a dead laptop? The most time consuming part (for me) is making a bootable USB. After that I can push my already ready made configuration and just back to where I was (backs ups are important).
Working on different versions of Python? No problem, a small nix script for each environment.
Working with different versions of GCC? Same as Python.
Everything just works. And if I fuck around I can revert the change. I can easily experiment in a way that will no fuck affect my ability to work.
At work we have Ubuntu, and I got the conclusion that nuking Canonical’s offices will be a blessing on humanity. They manage to deliver broken packages for years, even packages that work well on Debian.
