NixOS 26.05

I really love NixOS for my two devices, one surface laptop (lol), and my nvidia pc. It reduced my headaches with drivers so much.

Before updating my nvidia driver or something related to my surface I was scared to break something. With NixOS I can just go back to the old working config.

Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

Yep, exactly the same experience as me. The fact that everything is declarative and revertible means that I'm much "braver" than I would be with virtually any other Linux.

An example I have given before, but there was a weird quirk with my ThinkPad with Linux, where with USB keyboards, if I hadn't been typing for more than a minute, it would have to "wake up" for about four seconds, so I'd lose the first couple words that I was typing.

Fixing this involved playing with a few boot parameters, which can be scary to play with on something like Ubuntu. The issue is annoying, but nothing I can't live with, so if I were on Ubuntu or something I probably would have just tried to live with it, but because it's NixOS, I realized that the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation, so I did a few experiments with boot parameters and fixed it.

I've ditched M$, switched to NixOS last month and I feel like I don't hate computers again. Shouldn't have procrastinated this for so long. All other operating systems feel so silly to use now (at least when they aren't anxiety- and rage-inducing).

I decided to move to NixOS a few months ago. In terms of OS, it was one of the best decisions I've made so far. It's awesome to have the rollback experience, upgrade whenever you want and also being able to experiment without being afraid of breaking already working stuff.

Another great benefit, is that AI can read my whole OS (good and bad at the same time, I know). This makes the AI way more accurate on giving you a good solution instead of having to scan all of your OS and dig into /etc.

Personally, I really like NixOS. It's hard but definetely worth the try. Probably not for everyone, but worth it if you're a computer scientist or need to maintain hundreds of computers.

NixOS has been my daily driver since 2022/2023 and I have greatly improved the management of my 2 computers and few VMs since. Because of LLMs, I now understand the language much better, but even if I didn't want to write Nix directly, describing the config to AI usually produces good results.

The two main sticking points IMO are still:

- Development environments are still a pain. devenv.sh is great for web and backend, but not perfect for dependency (package) management and more complicated environments like mobile or embedded

- nixpkgs monorepo doesn't update fast enough IMO. As a consequence, I see a number of flake repositories popping up to more easily package and distribute software not yet on nixpkgs or that don't update often enough (https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix is a good example). This is perhaps by design, but it takes some digging to find the reliable and trustworthy flake repos. I'm increasingly concerned with AUR-like trust issues