Comment by ParticlesRWaves

I recently tried NixOS 24.11 but quickly decided it’s not for me or something I’d recommend. While the system initially seemed promising, it was frustrating in practice.

My first hurdle was configuring the network in configuration.nix. The installed template implies network settings go there, but that’s misleading. Worse, "nixos-rebuild switch" requires a working network, so a broken config leaves the system unable to fix itself – a catch-22.

Next, I tried "nix search wget", as suggested in the manual, but hit errors about missing experimental features. I had to enable both nix-command and flakes manually to get this to work:

    nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes search nixpkgs wget

Even then, package search, like configuration, seems to depend on a network connection, which feels unnecessarily fragile.

(edit: formatting)

craftkiller 3 days ago

> "nixos-rebuild switch" requires a working network, so a broken config leaves the system unable to fix itself – a catch-22

I just ran into this on an airplane! I'm relatively new to nixos (~4 weeks in) and I had configured my laptop to use DNS over TLS and DNSSEC, which is normally not a problem. But to get through those login gateways for the wifi, you need to disable all of that so they can MitM your DNS requests. "Thats no problem, everything is already in my nix store so I should be able to comment out those lines and run a nixos-rebuild" I thought to myself, but alas I was wrong. I'm sure I could have worked through it with enough persistence but it was a short enough flight that I decided to just wait until I landed to continue my otherwise wonderful journey into the nix.

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