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Comment by skerit | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of NixOS, but there not being a single clear guide of how to set everything up (and the messy documentation) is the biggest thing holding me back. I also really don't like wasting so much time on tinkering with my system the way I used to do.

But I'm seeing so much Nix news these past few weeks, I guess it'll be better in a few years!

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I think you can get going with little to no knowledge. Setup the system, choose a few cool options and packages, and go rebuild. Simple as that.

The difficulty comes from the advanced topics. Modularizing your setup, writing your own packages, generally going off the beaten path.

I did not do any of that (yet). I will in the future, but I am fine with my low-level setup. One machine, one user. A bit later I moved to Nix Flakes (which is just an additional wrapper file around the previously written config) and added a few overlays.

My trick: I downloaded every single public "NixOS" dotfile repository I could find, and then just used "ripgrep" to find anything I was interested in.

Another cool trick I read is setting up a VM to test a small config and get a feeling for it, and then decide if yo want to proceed.

NixOS' saving grace when it comes to the learning curve is that experimentation is extraordinarily safe, thanks to the declarative config and rollback functionality. If you don't know what you're doing, you can pretty painlessly get away with just fucking around.

Not just that. The ability to enter a sandboxed shell environment, play around with as many packages as you can get your hands on, and then exit back to my clean machine is my absolute favorite feature!!!

SO many times in the past, I'd be concerned about installing new things because they'd break my otherwise pristine developer environment. Yes, rvm/nvm/virtualenv and others help, but they fail to hold a candle to the nix-shell!

>I really like the idea of NixOS, but there not being a single clear guide of how to set everything up (and the messy documentation) is the biggest thing holding me back.

Yeah this part is messy, and why I always disclaim that I had a learning curve of several months to make the transition. However, my system setup is a little more complex than the standard install - mirrored ZFS root drives on dual m.2 drives, with mirrored boot partitions. That wasn't in the docs, needed a blog post to explain it [1].

>I also really don't like wasting so much time on tinkering with my system the way I used to do.

I've found that once you get everything configured to your liking, you spend similar or less time tinkering than on other OS's, just because the entire system config is captured in a single config file now. There's some up-front learning and work required, but after that it's smooth sailing.

[1]:https://elis.nu/blog/2019/08/encrypted-zfs-mirror-with-mirro...

I should add, to be fair to NixOS and the team, that there are three main official documenation sections: Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS:

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/

https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/

https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/

Anyone looking into transitioning to NixOS should take a leisurely weekend and just read through all three of those first. Being at least familiar with all of what's there will make getting up and running a lot smoother.

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