Mastodon: @toothbrush@possum.city

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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Mixing release streams dont infect other packages but yes you will have multiples of a lot of dependencies. Thats the one thing nixos eats up pretty well but with modern storage it doesnt really matter. I have a 512gb ssd and only use about 200gb of it with nixos, vms and all my personal data. I havent thought about running out of storage in a lot of time. Tho your own usage may vary, i dont have many heavy packages other than a few design tools.

    The zero time really is true, i just search the nix repo, add it to my config and rebuild. 2 mins. The only things ive struggled with are dependencies for building stuff but ive always been someone to struggle with it so i just started compiling in vms and now i just do it with distrobox. It works for me, i didnt even change my workflow from other distros but it may not work for you. I definitely recommend trying nixos out and if you like it you will love it. Just dont go too deep in the rabbit hole, i know people whos home is a temp directory and its rebuilt on every boot and their root is also rebuilt the same way. Dont even ask why or how 💀





  • Nixos is amazing especially for use cases like yours. Ive been using it for id say 8 months. Never had anything break on me ever that had to do anything with updates. The most you do is edit your config sometimes because they renamed something.

    As for dotfiles you can keep em how you did it before, your home directory doesnt have to be immutable.

    Nixlang isnt that hard if you dont do anything insane and you can copy most things from other peoples configs. If you have custom executables theres actually a really good way of packaging it for you own setup and you can use them as any other package.

    Nix-shell is really good when you need something instantly. It just drops you into a shell with the packages installed that you asked for. I tested out compositors by just using nix-shell on the tty and running them to see how they work.

    For packages its basically 0 time. Nixos has an insane number of packages for almost everything and even when its not packaged you can get flakes other people made(bit like aur now that i think about it) and it will build the package for you.

    Idk that much about dev envs, for me its just and ubuntu or fedora distrobox because literally everything is made to be compiled on those and its easier than searching for every package you need because of course every distro has completely different names for it. As for setting up your own dev envs i heard its a blessing and really good.

    Idk for encryption is just have LUKS, dont know about the technicalities that much.

    Something i recommend is not falling down the rabbit hole of making everything immutable. Your dot files can be just the way you already have them. Home manager is cool and all but after moving literally all of my configs to it i realized its just an extra useless layer of abstraction. Just upload you config directory to github and everything will be easy to manage. Also sometimes my system doesnt build because of some conflict in my config files. Kinda stupid to have the most stable packaging system ive ever seen in my life and then fail a build because of your neofetch config or something.

    Another amazing thing on nixos is that you can have multiple streams of packagesm. My system is on stable(because its stable lol but still rapid enough for me) but some of my packages are on unstable. Firefox vulnaribility? Just update it to unstable and EVERYRHING WORKS. It NEVER breaks.

    Sorry for the novel length comment but in the end if you have the need for a stable unstable system the nixos is perfect. Tbh i wish there was something simpler that did what nixos does. Someone could make something built on nixos that abstracts away the features that 99% of users dont need.