A week on NixOS
Hi everyone! its been a bit more than a week since I posted here asking about how to test nix, and for the next 2 days I tried the minimal install on a VM and after having a reasonably decent setup i decided to use these config files to install it on my desktop, and on my laptop on the next day (I had base arch on my desktop and cachyos on my laptop).
And to be honest I had a blast, I was able to accomplish basically everything I had on arch and a few more things, and here are the highlights:
- I was able to sync my desktop and laptop in a way I never thought possible, almost everything thats on my desktop that my laptop can run is also on my laptop with just a git pull and a rebuild, its almost the same system except for the particular needs/possibilities of the respective hardware.
- On arch/cachy I had to install a really old version of quartus for university, and It didnt work on the base system for obvious reasons, so I used distrobox with ubuntu 16, on Nix I was able to do everything by making a quartus module that added the old libraries the program needed. Did i do it the best way possible? Probably not, but I really like how its native on my os.
- I was able to declarativelly install spicetify and vencord with all of my extensions, and that was so magical to me because everytime i had to install discord/spotify i had to do it all over again!
- It was pretty easy to get my dot files from arch to nix, although the version of hyprland on the stable branch is older, making my dotfiles not work, so I just switched hyprland to the unstable branch (which i also think is rly cool to be able to do)
I really really like the fact that I can visually see everything thats on my system by reading the files, on arch after months of modifications, I kind of felt lost on what I had done to my system and got worried if there was anything that was problematic that i forgot about. I was learning linux so I ended up trying lots of stuff to see whats the best and correct way to do things (I switched from windows in september).
Ofc not everything was 100% awesome, but most of it was more due to a learning curve/adapting to the new system, like i wasn't 100% a fan of having to rebuild the whole system on every package installation but I knew it would be waaay less of a problem when I had most things installed, and I decided to opt for flatpaks if the program I'm installing is not integral to my system/usage.
TLDR I think im here to stay, even tho I really like arch, Nix fixes most of the gripes I had with arch.