I use NixOS, btw (don’t you see that glorious gif?). It’s the only distro that is actually different compared to other distros. It’s not just another package manager, another ubuntu skin, or a different desktop environment. If you learn how to configure it, you can easily redo breaking changes or install an exact copy of your system on a different device. You can configure all you want and you will never ever have to worry.
It’s super cool to be able to copy a single or maybe two configuration files from one box to another, sync thing your home folder and have an exact copy.
It’s super cool to temporarily install things with nix-shell. I have little environments set up where I write python or rust or edit videos and if I’m not in that environment none of those commands even exist.
Updating in vanilla is pretty straightforward. Update your base channel, rebuild. But if you install say home manager as a flake that doesn’t update the same way. And then if you do it as an environmental install it doesn’t update the same way. And then it’s totally possible to do an update get a new version of your web browser, But your auto starts or your PWA’s point to the old version of the web browser. My personal favorite is when I update signal. It upgrades the database. Field binary is no longer capable of running but is still the default for some reason. I have to look up the command expunge it from the store, simply finding it in the store isn’t trivial.
Most distros have gotten easy to the point of being boring. We don’t suffer that fate in Nix.
I use NixOS, btw (don’t you see that glorious gif?). It’s the only distro that is actually different compared to other distros. It’s not just another package manager, another ubuntu skin, or a different desktop environment. If you learn how to configure it, you can easily redo breaking changes or install an exact copy of your system on a different device. You can configure all you want and you will never ever have to worry.
Also has better flex than Arch users.
cons
It’s super cool to be able to copy a single or maybe two configuration files from one box to another, sync thing your home folder and have an exact copy.
It’s super cool to temporarily install things with nix-shell. I have little environments set up where I write python or rust or edit videos and if I’m not in that environment none of those commands even exist.
Updating in vanilla is pretty straightforward. Update your base channel, rebuild. But if you install say home manager as a flake that doesn’t update the same way. And then if you do it as an environmental install it doesn’t update the same way. And then it’s totally possible to do an update get a new version of your web browser, But your auto starts or your PWA’s point to the old version of the web browser. My personal favorite is when I update signal. It upgrades the database. Field binary is no longer capable of running but is still the default for some reason. I have to look up the command expunge it from the store, simply finding it in the store isn’t trivial.
Most distros have gotten easy to the point of being boring. We don’t suffer that fate in Nix.