NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”

Nix the set of tools gives you convenient command line tools that can: evaluate Nix language expressions, build recipes, analyze build-time or run-time dependency graphs of a recipe, give you ephemeral shells with the packages you want in scope but not installed "globally", package management tools to install packages globally, and recipe diffing tools so you can see how recipes changed.

Nix the package manager is a convenient, gigantic, community effort to explicitly describe how to (reproducibly) build almost all of the OSS software that users need and it comes with a substitution cache so that most recipe build products are easily substituted when installing, so you don't have to build. Even if you don't use Nix, nixpkgs is still impressive because you have the most explicit documentation for how to build a piece of software from source and all of its dependencies than anywhere else on the internet, it usually rivals project author's in its specificity, explicitness, and clarity.

NixOS the Linux distribution combines all of this together with a convenient configuration module system and generally good defaults to give you an operating system that is declaratively specified from your etc hosts file all the way down to the recipe for building the kernel, a rich and granular dependency graph, reproducible OS configuration builds, and diffs between closures.

My biggest gripe with Nix is the lack of static types. This was the originator's biggest mistake that Nix will be living with for a very long time to come. Static types would have helped bring the learning curve down IMHO and made it easier to document and less frustrating to debug.

That being said, the overall properties of Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS far outweigh the pain points in my six years of production experience with it and for what we care about: auditability, reproducibility, explicitness, efficiency, and integrity.

Everything about Nix can be trivially refactored. Every part is neatly isolated from the rest.

So what does this get us? In theory, this is now trivially-buildable on any distro that has nix installed, or on nixos. I haven't converted it to a flake yet (still learning that) but if I (or someone else) did, it would be deterministically reproducible anywhere on nix.

I agree that there's a learning curve on figuring out the "recipe" for a thing, but once someone does that work, it's basically done forever. Which is a promise that no other system can even approach.

And once you figure out a certain amount of it, this moment will come where you realize you want every system you deal with to be Nixified. Like the guy elsewhere in this thread who rebuilt his own router using NixOS and loves it.

Getting new developers up to speed in your shop's dev environment? Completely trivial to do with Nix. Getting a machine back up after a failure? Reinstall NixOS and reapply the config you were using (which is in source control). Upgraded Gnome and some things you need broke? Or updated your GPU driver and now your screen just shows black? Simple... Roll back in the bootloader to a previously-working config, then undo your changes to the config definition.

Have 10 different projects all with different dependencies and version requirements that would normally collide with each other? Trivial, each project has its own default.nix file and Nix can drop you right into that environment while you're working on those projects.

NixOS (and very honorable mention to Guix) are in fact the only ways to run Linux while keeping your sanity intact!