Been learning #NixOS the last two weeks on my laptop and enjoying it. Updated my Arch desktop yesterday and my OS got borked again so I said fuck it and installed NixOS. It was way faster because I could basically just deploy my laptop's config and now I have a near identical setup between both systems. I've since diverged the configs but it was really cool to be able to start from that same base setup so easily. And if I buy a new computer some day I can just deploy this config. Cool stuff!

@rickoooooo it's such a pleasure for when you're moving around across devices!

Recently got rid of an old server, which of course ran NixOS because servers CRAVE NixOS, and replaced with a new one.

Was literally up and running with an identical setup in just an hour! Had some hardcoded Mac addresses, but besides that, Nix just made the whole thing so pleasurable to do.

@embedding_shapes I can see how NixOS would be a great fit for servers. I'm curious to see how it works for me long term on my workstations. I setup my desktop with impermenance as well, because I hate that feeling of random bits of junk collecting over time. And I figure this will force me to have just about everything declared as opposed to manually configured. But I also think it might end up being too restrictive when I need to just get something done real quick. Only time will tell!

@rickoooooo @embedding_shapes One of my secondary desktop runs NixOS and it's perfectly usable as long as you are willing to spend some extra time to look up docs when you introduce some more serious change (e.g. new HW). "I need to just get something done real quick" is exactly the way junk gets piled up, but IME NixOS educates you to either use a temporary install or setup things in containers/VMs that will probably pay off in the long run (I also have a VM host, so this may be easier to do for me).

@buherator @rickoooooo It is true that that's the way junk piles up, but given sometimes you have deadlines either from others or yourself that you need to hit, it's sometimes valuable to be able to punt that into the future, "technical debt" and all that. As long as you eventually come back, it's fine.

But NixOS really doesn't afford you to do even that, it's "correct or nothing" which for many professionals kind of gets in the way of delivering.

@embedding_shapes @rickoooooo nix-shell works though, leaving you with tasks that are too complex for that but don't justify a container. Now I'm sure that can be a deal-breaker too, but it's worth keeping in mind that there is room for ad-hoc tasks.

@rickoooooo yeah, gave NixOS on desktop/laptop a try a bunch of times, but always end up needing to run various binaries that require a bunch of workarounds. Like I use Cascadeur and Spine2D for various animation stuff, and getting them running on NixOS was a pain, then new updates broke it.

Eventually I folded and moved back to Arch Linux for personal computing needs, but NixOS on every server still, hard to beat :)

So yeah, too restrictive for desktop computing, at least for me.

@embedding_shapes my personal PCs are mainly just for web browsing, music, and office tools. So I'm hoping I'll be OK. I haven't had time lately for hacking projects so my pc usage is sort of vanilla. I do occasionally need something weird so that's when this setup will really be tested I think. I'm tempted to put this on my work pc too but I admit I'm more nervous about it because I do a lot more odd things on there. Of course the odd configurations are exactly why I want a declarative OS!

@buherator @embedding_shapes I've been playing with nix run a bit, to run programs in a one off manner and that's pretty cool for things I only would need on rare occasion. I haven't used nix-shell yet but it looks like a more beefed up version of that where you can configure the whole env with multiple one-off packages. That sounds really useful.