Comment by ris 6 days ago
I think this is quite a fair commentry (although I quite like the Nix language personally) - as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop. For me it shines on servers and development environments.
Wholeheartedly agree.
NixOS gave me back my desire to customise my Linux again. I’ve run Linux since 1997; I’ve run a lot of distros.
Having to reconfigure my Linux on every hardware reset (1-2 years apart) just exhausted me to a point where I ran GNOME on Ubuntu so I wouldn’t waste time on one-off stuff.
My .emacs and .vimrc shrunk to 10% so I could reproduce them from memory if I had to.
With NixOS, installing a new machine and having it work exactly like all my machines is minutes of work.
I’ll never lose my hyper-customised setup again.
Running something like Arch or Artix again feels very much like losing my “save” button.
Seconded. I switched to NixOS a year ago after an apt install broke my system one too many times, and so far I've been very very happy with it. I've broken things, but being able to roll back to an exact duplicate of the previous state has been a lifesaver. I can't imagine wanting to go back to repairing broken apt installs.
It mostly goes the other way, I think. The community surveys haven't asked about NixOS desktop usage in particular. Still, I'm certain that a large majority of contributors are running NixOS on their desktops/laptops/workstations.
That said there are prolific and longstanding contributors who focus on non-NixOS and even non-Linux platforms, and corporate users are likely to be running Nix on macOS or Ubuntu (under WSL). It's not surprising that some users who don't use NixOS on laptops or desktops have still become Nixpkgs contributors or maintainers, imo.
I think it's more like Microsoft folks running macs; technically valid, but odd optics. Besides, why would you use KubeVirt to run your desktop? Just run it in containers directly.
What is so interesting about Nix is that it's not one thing. Its not (just) a distro. Its not (just) a package manager. Its not (just) a system manager. Its not (just) a language. Its not (just) a build tool.
It is all those things, but specifically, what you want it to be. Yes, that makes it super confusing, but also powerful.
You can use it daily, intimately, without using nixos. Using it for dev environments on macos for example, and servers. Did that for years before I installed nixos on my desktop.
As a counterpoint, I'm rather the opposite of you:
1. I use Nix primarily on the desktop (2 laptops, 2 workstations), though I also use it on one server. I don't think I could ever go back to any other Linux distro for my daily-driver. Things "just work" to a degree that they never have for me on e.g. Ubuntu.
2. I quite despise the Nix language; this is not to say that I think it's particularly bad (or good) as a language, just that nearly every single degree-of-freedom in language design that is largely about personal taste takes the opposite choice to what I would prefer
3. I find setting up development environments with it to be very hit-or-miss, to the point where I have in some cases fallen back on what I would do without nix, and used nix-ld to fill in the gaps.
> as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop
that's not every encouraging :)