If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids

fd93 – Why I Left NixOS for Ubuntu

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2024-05-02 13:00:03

If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids are using something called NixOS.

Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source, I decided to give NixOS a try. However, after hitting rock bottom and waking up, coldly sweating, in a darkened apartment surrounded by printouts of configuration.nix, I decided to return to the warm and wholesome embrace of Ubuntu.

It can be hard to understand the attraction of NixOS if you haven't had some exposure to infrastructure or system administration before.

NixOS offers a unique set of features which make it very attractive from a system operator or power user perspective. These are largely based around avoiding issues which plague other Linux distributions.

Unlike most Linux distributions, NixOS's package manager is not primarily designed to pull down binaries from a repository. It's designed to create reproducible setups in a series of plaintext .nix files, starting with configuration.nix.