NixOS manages to be all of these at once except the manual dependency management
Nix
No
It’s there to solve your “This is boring” issue without having to do all of the system configuration stuff manually*.
I was able to package a nightly AppImage as if it were installed normally like an app, and I could reinstall the system if I wanted to, and it’d still be there. NixOS is the opposite of manual dependency resolution, it’s dependency heaven. You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society. You can write a configuration file that does everything. You can do anything with NixOS. NixOS is the one true god, all hail NixOS—
Ah, I see why you may not want to use it. Consider it though, it’s genuinely good and trying doesn’t hurt.
I haven’t even told you about nix-comma or nix helper (nh) yet. May the, uh, flake be with you.
*You do have to write the config files, though you can just adapt someone else’s configuration.
For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh
Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static package store without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. For instance, imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
NixOS – now I’ve finally found the endgame distro!
several days later CachyOS is actually much simpler.
A boring OS is a healthy OS.
Tune Arch ONCE. Sets you for life
Until you switch laptops or upgrade your PC parts.
