The config file thing works better for NixOS, but the même is still very funny !
NixOS shills be like “your entire system is set up in one single file”.
They don’t tell you that the documentation looks like this:
This may be the longest single page I’ve ever seen. The scrollbar moves almost imperceptibly.
This just makes me want to get into nix even more. Put configs in a git repo and build vms until you have the config you want, then update only when you’re doing something new. I use Arch btw. For desktop. Otherwise it’s a mix fedora, red hat, debian, Ubuntu, cent, bsd, armbien, openWRT, and a few others.
That’s the raw documentation. There’s plenty of other articles that are actually useful.
Isn’t it kinda sad that one has to rely on third-party articles to even understand the package manager/OS one wants to use?
NGL I was THIS close to actually looking into trying nixos out, I mean the concept is intriguing.
But after seeing that…
I’d say it’s definitely worth it. I don’t actually use nixos itself, but I do use nix a lot. I have everything I need for work in a home manager configuration, so I can literally just install nix and load up my config and have all programs and configuration of said programs installed and ready to go (on any UNIX system). I started doing this since changing jobs means a new machine, and I got really tired of all of the inconsistencies between machines when bringing over my dotfiles, and having to install a bunch of packages I use every time I changed jobs.
I do want to make the switch from Arch to nixos on my personal machine eventually too, but I hardly spend any time on computers outside of work these days, unfortunately. But the great thing is that my home manager configuration can pretty easily slide right into a nixos configuration, which is what many people do.
Honestly you should ! Unless you want to do crazy stuff you actually don’t need to learn the entire documentation.
I was able to setup full disk encryption with encrypted boot loader pretty easily, there are great tutorials out there. I’m going to figure out Secure Boot next.
The nice thing is that once you’ve managed to do something, it’s in your config forever. My main problem with Arch was the absence of rollbacks, and having to remember all the stuff you do when installing it that you inevitably forget before the next time your system breaks and needs a reinstall. There’s none of that with Nix, and it’s awesome.
