Comment by emarthinsen
Comment by emarthinsen 3 days ago
I use NixOS as my daily driver. I concur. I wouldn't recommend it for most people (even for me, when I decided to give it a try). I'd probably just go Arch if I were to do it over again.
The concept behind Nix/NixOS is amazing, but it needs to be polished. Flakes are the future, but they are languishing in this experimental status. Even simple things like installing packages from stable and unstable channels are too hard to figure out. The documentation is terse and the community answers are often not enlightening.
A big complaint of mine is that the builds should be reproducible, but I find I sometimes need to run `nixos-rebuild switch` several times to get a successful build. The error messages mysteriously resolve themselves. For me, this doesn't pass the bar for being considered reproducible.
Don't get me started on using an NVIDIA graphics card also. Granted, part of my difficulties is that I was running Wayland, which doesn't have the best NVIDIA support, but I felt like I was just doing an exhaustive search through the potential config settings to see what worked. Ultimately, I found just the right combination of settings to get everything working buttery smooth. I ripped out the NVIDIA card and put an AMD card in.
Installing packages from different channels is still far easier than on any other distro. Try getting a Debian 10 package to work on Debian 13. You can't. GUI programs are hard because how GUIs work on Linux. You cannot make them easily pure, they always rely on the booted system through drivers and a bunch of impure things all over the place.
If the software you are using has race conditions in its build system then there is only so much you can do to fix that. You could for example run nothing in parallel with only one core but then everything would be painfully slow. Also the occasional network hickup breaks things. Lately also io_uring in combination with nodejs has been a great source for kernel bugs. You can only bang the software so much from the outside.
Nvidia is bad because Nvidia is bad but at least switching between different driver versions and variants is possible without leaving a trace of old things behind on your system like on literally any other distro.