autra 4 days ago

To counterpoint this, I'm an happy nixos desktop user. It's not perfect, but still vastly better than a non declarative distro for my taste.

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  • sshine 4 days ago

    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.

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  • lolinder 4 days ago

    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.

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pxc 4 days ago

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.

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ris 6 days ago

Why? It just isn't what draws me to Nix.

I've never even really tried NixOS on the desktop TBH.

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  • tuananh 6 days ago

    nothing. it's just from someone with no experience with nix like me, it feel weird that someone is already deep into Nix but isn't tempted to use it daily.

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    • wpm 5 days ago

      Maybe it’s everyone else using it on their daily driver that got it wrong?

      It’s like doubting Kubernetes because one of the maintainers doesn’t run their desktop in KubeVirt.

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      • yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago

        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.

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    • jmartens 4 days ago

      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.

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    • woile 5 days ago

      I've been using nix in a Mac for a year now. Recently I got a new Lenovo machine and first thing I did was install nixos, it's actually much better than I was expecting. You do notice that nix is designed around nixos

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    • cbrozefsky 6 days ago

      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.

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