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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

I just bit the bullet and use NixOS as my Desktop. There's a bit of work after initial install, to setup your config files the way you want, but after that you're all set. I've had no problems transferring my configs when I change hardware, and end up with an identical environment that I had on my previous computer.

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I recently switched as well and am very happy. I don't think that re-configuring takes much longer that the average distro would especially because a lot of services you can just say `services.foobar.enable = true` and get a decent default config. You only need to spend your time configuring the things that you are picky about.

And yes, the fact that I can configure all of my systems with a shared set of configs and have consistent and reproducible environments is fantastic.

I wrote up my thoughts about the switch here: https://kevincox.ca/2020/09/06/switching-to-desktop-nixos/

Sidenote, i'm taking the plunge into NixOS, but notably using Flakes.

While i've dabbled in Nix in the past some things felt more odd to me than perhaps they should have. Primarily the fact that it felt like all these configs were spread out and i didn't understand how Nix wanted me to version them.

Flakes (from early tests) seems to make this very clear. As it starts from a repo, so i'm attempting to make all my configs, including Home Manager (of which also feels weird lol) start from the Flakes installation.

Flakes also solves the reproducibility problem that i didn't get why NixOS had. So far it's really neat.

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