this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
I still need to give NixOS the college try. The docs are slowly getting better but other than that I have heard great things from all over the Internet about it once you get your head around it. I failed at figuring it out on my own but the day will come where it makes sense I'm sure.
Between zero-to-nix.com and nixos.wiki, I think there are enough docs to get started with it quickly.
I feel like it is too complicated for a desktop user. Linux is already complicated enough. On Silverblue I had to do some mental gymnastic to make some things work because everything is just made for Workstation. I don't think the advantages outweigh the benefits
I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?
Funny. Whole reason I use nixos is because I cba to tinker with my systems anymore. Tell me another OS with which I can manage 20+ systems with even less effort and I'd consider switching.
Ah but then you are talking about servers? That would be a different story! The machine that I use for development (laptop) should always work (I would trust nixos with this) and if I want to spin up a container (docker run) or install an application (apt install)or change my vpn client configuration it is currently effortless and I'm not sure nixos can do that.
Actually using nixos for some of my private servers would be a nice use case...
I use it for workstations, laptops and servers alike. I also configure them all on my home pc and remote push the config. Been a while since I manually SSH'd onto one of my machines...