Same but with kernel. What lead me to nixos: company gave me a laptop with iGPU that wasn't supported by any released linux kernel. There were patches waiting to be merged, with nixOS making an installer image that supports my machine was simple.

I'm not sure if I live in some kind of parallel world, because I never had any problems grokking Nix or NixOS. I started with this book[0] and haven't ever really been confused.

[0]: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world

>I haven’t given it a shot in the LLM age

I haven't tried it in almost a year, but using Claude Code for setting up my nix config back then worked amazingly well. I've only dabbled in NixOS, and I'm very tempted to it for my workstation when I reinstall it in the next month.

Given how much Claude Code + Opus have improved in the last year, I'd give it a fighting chance to make a nice Nix config. I'll probably start setting up a spare laptop to get the base configs dialed in before switching over to it.

LLMs are a real gamechanger for Nix, highly recommend giving it a go again.

Flakes are de facto standard at this point. Expressions are easy once you get used to them - in fact the Nix language grows on many of us, including myself, once you internalize it.

Using AI to generate Nix config is a superpower. Because the entire system is declared in a single set of config, you can basically spell cast any system you want. I one-shotted a Linux distro with custom branding for boot, installation screen, and login screen, and VPN and dev tools installed and configured by default, at a fortune 500 tech company.

Obligatory Guix plug. I've found it way easier to understand, but it has teething issues that NixOS doesn't (latest for me was a few problems with DMs). And according to an acquaintance of mine, it works reasonably well with an LLM.

What would the in between be?

Yep disk space and learning curve are the two major downsides to Nix. The former has never been a problem for me in practice, just run garbage collection once a month. The latter was a big problem, but is now mitigated for most people by LLMs.

Yes. But disk space isn't exactly the most valuable resource you have as a developer/power user

Yes, however the space is not „used up” in a classic sense. It’s a cache, so you can give up some of it and reclaim your space. Fresh after a full cleanup it won’t take much more than a regular distro.

actually once I garbage collect, nixos actually uses up less disk space for me than other distros

Use nix.optimise.automatic = true in the config and perform nix-collect-garbage if necessary. With this it doesn't take much.

Nix isn't really much of a hobby. It does require some learning because it's different, and front-loading the work to build your config, but after that it's amazingly reliable and easily extendable. You can keep everything up to date with a single command.

The advantages:

- Declarative code describes your system. Maybe your install + imaging flow is good enough, but there are many reasons why it's technically inferior. There's no need for imaging Nix, because it's always reproducible by default. Rollbacks are rebooting to a previous config, not a timestamped blob of snowflake state.

- It replaces whatever tools and glue you have to build your system. You don't need to worry about bootstrapping tools, or config management tools' version compatibility, or bespoke ordering of imperative steps to build the system. All the management tools are built into the system. Everything "just works" automatically.

- If you manage multiple machines the benefits are compounding.

- There are other interesting bits that are covered in the article, that you get for free just due to the nature of nix. It's good for building, and has no friction to experimenting with specific tools or environments, without polluting your system.

It's a commitment to get past the initial learning and config build, but afterwards it significantly lessens the "hobby" aspects of computer management. There are just entire classes of problems that don't exist for Nix. Either your config works, or it doesn't, and the rollback guarantee is explicit and built-in.

For me, it's the difference between taking your medicine a bit at a time on your own schedule or taking it all at once as an unwelcome surprise. Sure, setting up file system mounts or adding udev entries is easier to do once in Ubuntu than in NixOS, but I only need to do it the one time with NixOS. Thereafter, the config serves as both documentation and backup. For a hobby self hoster like me who occasionally shoots himself in the foot and has to rebuild a system, it is ideal. I don't know if it really saves me time, but I do know it saves my sanity.

I am no nix whiz, but it's the only OS I run outside of containers. Anything I can't easily get with my nix config I shove into a container, run it as a quadlet, and call it good.

The configuration system is way more stable then it seems. You write it once and then pretty much never touch it again.

Imo it's the opposite. Since the system is defined in config files, an AI agent can look at live system state/errors vs. the config file and do all the work of figuring out the issue.

Also, using higher level modules like home manager makes things more declarative and less fiddly since someone else is maintaining the lower level.

Maybe nix is a downgrade for what you do. But I loved nix so much that I also migrated to nix on macOS (nix-darwin). No more homebrew.

nixos updates tend to be a lot less eventful than others distro, in fact the way it largely prevent system borking when updating, is spiritually freeing.