NixOS is only bad when you learn to fly, mostly because not enough docs. But when you are all bruised up, it's a joy through and through.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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For everyone who doesn't have several different systems to maintain, I find the advantages of nixOS to be marginal. Sure, you can argue about atomicity and all, but honestly I don't remember ever running into a serious problem with debian either. The huge package repo is nice, but I rarely encounter an app I can't get through apt, flatpak, or as an appimage.
At the same time, nix also has various downsides. Documentation sucks. There are two main ways to manage the system, they both pretend to be the better one, and it's super hard to even get started. That's not an issue with the technology, but just a lack of priority. Guix is much better on that end (but also comes with the same marginal advantages).
On the other hand, debian has a stable community, with proper processes, democratic structures etc.
This is a nice, kind of old presentation from debconf, where people discussed nix and how this could be useful in a debian context as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGrcLEweglg
So, if you FOMO, don't worry. Debian and other options have this on the radar and have their ways to adapt (even if slowly)
Nix-shell and nix flakes are unparalleled, I can't really live without them anymore. Hell, I even use them on my work Windows machine inside WSL.
Personally Iβve found the transition to be much more than marginal. Systems are defined not by the state of the machine itself but by the config describing it which is much more transparent and manageable. Non-declarative systems are great if youβre just running small services, are changing and experimenting a lot. Or just donβt canβt if your system goes down or bloats over the year. Declarative systems save you whole lot of management headaches especially if you are working with others, or arenβt constantly reviewing your old work.
Except that things change as well in (or rather "around") declarative systems, and you have to update your config files as well. That's because the underlying software changes, and it has nothing to do with whether your system is declarative or not. You just need to put in the work to update your configs at a different point in time.
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Nixos has been extremely easy to get working for most stuff. If you stray off the trail at all, it gets complicated. Possible! But complicated for my little brain.
Development seems to be a bit of bite in the ass.
Intellij does have a package but for some reason plugins use often some random binaries and those do not work well with nixos.
Also getting always the right dependencies for the current project was for me difficult to learn.
For my dev environment Iβve had great success combining home-manager and their integration with
Sure, it doesnβt quite fit the nix philosophy perfectly, but everything is still in my home.nix file and my home directory, and and I can swap tool versions on the fly and direct IntelliJ to their locations pretty easily
Embrace the --impure
The problem is, no one on Nix is going to stay on the trail. We are all there since we left it long ago.
still weeks ahead of the gentoo user
I had 0 issues with Gentoo.
And it updates in a manner of hours on 3700X (LibreOffice and Firefox are the worst offenders).
Hmmm I was annoyed that my slow internet slowed down my arch update by 6 minutes.
I have very fast internet, so no waiting there.
But fuck LLVM and Clang.
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How about installing nix on Gentoo?
There are people in your life who care about you too much to let you do that to yourself... I assume...
Everything has to be compiled on Gentoo, right? So would the many binary nix packages even work?
They would. But if you want to do it the Gentoo way, just disable using cache in Nix, it will manually compile every package you install.
I'd rather teach my grandma to install gentoo than ever touch nixOS again.
Real masochists: CubeOS
For Steam games.
Who hurt you?
Gentoo is awesome, especially if you are a developer. Every toolchain at your fingertips. Easy full stack debugging!
I keep telling myself that one of these days, surely, I'll eventually leave my comfy Fedora rpm-ostree setup, try out NixOS, and make the most of its super unique package management.
Surely.
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Do a better on Linux from Scratch
I am seriously considering switching to either Gentoo or 9front...
Switch to 9front, 9front, 9front!
Damn, it looks like everyone whom I told about this just wants to see me suffer. Alrighty then, see ya in... sometime. The journey sure looks rough, given that my hardware is barely supported by linux, nevermind an experimental OS from the 90s...
I've always liked the idea of running Plan 9. I haven't had the courage to try it out though.
Gentoo isn't so bad if you're good at reading instructions and value control and customization
You forgot secret option 3 - I use arch btw
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