Why I love NixOS

What I'd like to see is Omarchy implemented via the Nix package manager. (Seems like a good project for AI, actually.)

Gobolinux comes to mind.

If you don't mind a very limited set of software, the way tinycorelinux is setup can also allow multiple different tcz installed

These two Linux distros essentially allow two different versions of same software/libraries (glibc/python whatever) installed

(Gobolinux explicitly states that whereas I find it to be an unintended but elegant consequence for tinycorelinux but I recommend taking a look at Gobolinux)

The idea is so good it’s as close to platonic as it gets. The user experience of writing your own nix expressions is so bad that it makes me angry every time I try. Not only that, but at some point the beginner help (!) meta became »use flakes, don’t do what the existing tutorials tell you, yes flakes are unstable beta and there are no tutorials but use it I beg you«. No, please, let me choose my own way to learn!

I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age yet though, and trying out NixOS in a VM is not only easy, it is practical – in the sense that when you’re happy, you can simply boot that same config/OS anywhere else by just installing that config. And I’ll never forget that one time where I completely borked my everything in the VM, did a kernel rollback with like 3 command line args and a reboot, and the OS was, well, rolled back. As I said, almost platonic.

What I can recommend is using nix-the-package-manager. Whenever I need the newest version of something, `nix-env -i ` and it’s there and works. If it doesn’t, roll back. If I need a different version, that’s on nixpkgs as well, with the same negligible amount of friction.

That's not much different than other distros, because the way auto-update usually works, is it can't use root permissions or the system package manager (in any distro), so it has to install the newer version in $HOME. Once the update is installed, the system package becomes a trampoline to that.

I tried Discord, and this one seems to download some updates on first run, but the version sticks to the one from the system (0.0.127, latest is 0.0.129). So I assume it just doesn't update, or it tries to and fails.

What I like most about nixos is that you can have deterministically cached packages you don't need to rebuild every time in your ci.

It's also simple to setup dev environments with nix.