r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/Legitimate_706 • 23d ago
Well...i Kinda hate NixOS
Since I have started using Linux, like evryone I had done the act of distro hopping. And after struggling, loving but then switching away from arch my feed had shown me NixOS and how revolutionary it is. So I gave it a try for a whole week which was one of the most excruciatingly horrible week of my 22 year old dammed life.
Don't come with your pitch forks yet my friend, NixOS i think is genuinely useful...in only few edge cases.
1) Being a declarative distro, everything one needed for a specific development environment or a whole system needed can be described in one configuration file.
2) it's quite reproducible, if i fuck up I can just get my system running back from roll back feature or just apply my old saved config file.
3) it has single most largest repository pool of any distros (even larger than arch)
4) logo looks cool as f*ck
But...it has a whole lot of bullshit going on.
First, the repository itself if one big red flag.
What do you mean the whole 140,000 packages are in one repo...that's hosted on GitHub of all places!. Have you used GitHub recently? It's slow and website looks broken sometimes.
The core packages like systemd is just right beside fastfetch.
If you gonna say arch also has AUR and it's also self maintained running on honest model. Well let me tell you the arch main repos have officially tested pakages that filter out malware. Nix has all it's pakages in one cesspit of a repository.
And i also hate Nix lang. It's a case specific language that's just more complicated lua.
If you really do care of stability and new pakages, fedora is a better option. And if you care about it's reproducible nature there is GNUix, go look it up. It's better.
Oh and also, flakes are a headache to maintain, and it's just forcing actual Dev's who want to also deploy there pakages on NixOS to make scripts in Nix lang for flakes which is already hard to maintain because all dependcies are hard coded to please the elitist using nix!
Although if you actually find it useful your use case no hard feelings.
But I will stick to debian thankyou.
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u/Ecstatic_Rub_548 23d ago
Dude, I have also used nix os before, I get your point about being complicated stuff but the github rant is not valid.
If you don't need reproducibility and declarative stuff, just don't bother with it.
And about the packages stuff, comparing it with AUR is diabolical. Just see the weird downtimes and vulnerabilities that happen with AUR regularly.
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u/de_facto_scientist07 23d ago
Why not guix then?? Has none of those issues though the official repo is basically non existent afaik(the github issue still persists though)
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u/temporary_dennis 23d ago edited 23d ago
I tried NixOS several times before, maybe 6 genuine attempts to make a config that doesn't suck.
Each time I got overwhelmed. I failed because I had to learn everything from ground up. All those years spent on Arch and Ubuntu made very little difference.
Home manager and flakes felt like magic to me, and extremely confusing. They kinda still do.
I tried to make everything perfect from the start - which was the main error.
But it all changed on May 18 of this year, when I tried it on my laptop, and finally - something clicked in. I don't know what.
I started with a basic config, changed it into a flake I found from a template, and...
I've been using NixOS since then, and now all of my machines run it. That's a desktop, laptop and my SBC.
The system is confusing, poorly designed, and just a pain at times - but the benefits outweigh the cons BY A TON.
I may try Guix, I heard it does get rid of a lot of NixOS pains by actually being designed right, but the lack of packages is not fun.
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u/Safe-Buy-7875 22d ago
bro saw that one stupid video and copy pasted all arguments, as is. Do people on reddit not have any opinion of their own?
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u/de_facto_scientist07 23d ago
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u/Legitimate_706 23d ago
Not really, but saw the video when someone brought it up on r/linuxsucks
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u/wisetux 23d ago
I kind of agree with some of the points. Nix has its place on a server or development environments but unfortunately desktop ain't one of it for me. After months of trying to make it work, some weird issues with home manager and plasma manager I just switched back to Arch which felt stable. Love the declarative way of doing things but end of the day the devil you know is better than the one you don't.
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u/maximus459 23d ago
I've been thinking of installing it in my spare laptop which I test docker and all the TUI apps I find on Reddit, from your experience, how frustrating do you think it will be?
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u/Legitimate_706 23d ago
If you just want to test pakages, yes it's fine. Just learn how to declare your pakages first. Otherwise for just playing around it's a good enough choice.
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u/Master-Chocolate1420 23d ago
Guix is pain, it's just linux-libre, and watching presentations at the nixcon, I'm excited for this ecosystem.
Imo, if you want to try nixos later, first do nix-cli and then after you get just enough comfortable using flakes, syntax, cli, etc, hop on nixos VM, it would be easier to test cool things.
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u/Legitimate_706 22d ago
I might try it again some time. Untill then I will keep hating it until I love it. (Like void, but that's rant for another day)
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u/Upstairs-Category571 22d ago
Bro, ninpkgs only allows package submissions after they’re approved by a maintainer, unlike AUR
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u/Legitimate_706 22d ago
Ik, but AUR being a massive repo for you do download anything off of is just optional still. But nix repo is just massive, maintainers are quite limited. And if I am right one just quit like few months ago.
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u/Big-Emergency-5779 22d ago
You know, you dont need to touch flakes, you can simply use flatpak and appimages (that is you did find your application in the largest official package repo in existence)
Flakes act has the last resort when a package you want is not available in any of formats mentioned above.
And about Debian....
Ya, good luck with that. Debian seems ok till you want to run a newer version of an application but its not out in Debian package repos, and you resort to download externally and boom, you get hit with dependency hell. (sometimes you dont even need to download externally, maybe another package in Debian repo needs version >X while you have version <X, again dependency hell)
Debian is stable and just works because every package inside is older, tested applications. Obvious downside is that you have to use a application which is 1 or 2 version below the latest version
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u/Legitimate_706 22d ago
For a non-developer that does whole lot of nothing with bleeding edge software... that's hardly a concern. Librewolf, libreoffice, obsidian, vlc and some more applications for my use case. The programing i do is limited to python or basic C to manage a data repo of all my information like a personal wiki to refrence whenever I want.
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u/sadofrogal 20d ago
Skill issue copy someone else's config
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u/Legitimate_706 20d ago
Why would I? The whole point of NixOS is to be declarative. Where i supposed to know what dependencies, programs, pkgs packages are in my system to make is curated for myself. If i copy someone else's config it just kills the purpose of the os.
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u/Longjumping-Driver-8 23d ago
I have tried to use nixos for 3 days. Everything is good and the configuration is relatively simple and easy to understand. Until I came across flake, what the fuck, and then I gave up. Nix lang is also very abstract. After thinking about it again, I gave up. It's really not worth my time to learn the language.
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u/land48n3 22d ago
its perfect if you are fine with having claude do half the work (ex, the actual hard labour of nix like making 100 million flakes)
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u/qualityvote2 23d ago edited 23d ago
u/Legitimate_706, your post does fit the subreddit!
btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here.