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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

I'm the same but with Gentoo, which is another rolling distribution. I've had it installed for over 12 years on multiple servers without any issues.

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My preferred distro journey went: Mandrake -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Gentoo -> NixOS

I rage-quit Gentoo the first time (2002ish?) for Debian when stable portage got a broken version of gcc, making it very hard to recover. The second Gentoo was by far the longest, maybe 2003 through 2018? I'm 4 years into NixOS now and very happy with it. I actually run into issues with switching to new release channels almost as often as I did the few times I experimented with Ubuntu, but it's just so much easier to work around these issues by mixing-and-matching packages from different channels[1] that it just doesn't bother me.

It also got me to love systemd. Configuring systemd units (especially timers!) with nix is so much more ergonomic than the bare files that I pity anyone who has to do it by hand.

1: 95% of the time it's already fixed in unstable, the other 5% of the time I pull in the version from the previous release channel.

Windows -> Solaris -> Windows -> Gentoo -> Arch -> NixOS

I feel much more satisfaction pouring hours into NixOS over doing the same on Gentoo and Arch. The hours on nix are in a source file I can carry around. The hours on Gentoo and Arch I'm doomed to forget and have to repeat.

I do miss the AUR though. I haven't been able to package a rust program that has a build with a transitive dependency that expects internet access (https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry). Something something sandbox, crate2nix. But a frivolous install of a little binary that isn't packaged is not necessarily an easy endeavour.

Overall I'm very happy. Nix unstable feels equivalent to Arch more or less. You can pull in master with flakes easily enough too.

Yes, builds that expect internet access are not friendly with nix. It's particularly annoying when such packages are in something like cargo:

A: "We built this nice tool named cargo that manages transitive dependencies for you and will automatically fetch and build them from the internet"

B: F-this, I'll just download a tarball from the internet.

Ironically, what cargo does is just downloading tarballs from the internet for you.

For me it was: Windows -> Xandros (1 year) -> Ubuntu (6 years) -> Arch (4 years) -> NixOS (4 years)

Except I never actually installed Xandros myself, my dad just brought it home from work one day and installed in my computer.

Likewise, I think my oldest install is a Void Linux system (another rolling release). Unfortunately, I have no clue how old it is; musl doesn't keep login records (wtmp?), and this install has lived through not merely multiple machines (moving hard drives from one box to another) but multiple filesystems (rsynced from I think ext4 to f2fs to zfs) and I think one of those jumps lost timestamps because the oldest time I can get is younger than I think the system is. Regardless, there's something special about that degree of continuity - at work, I like cattle, but at home I actually enjoy having a pet around.

Hrm...

    $ qlop -tvm|head -n1

    2007-01-18T19:50:33 >>> x11-base/xorg-server-1.1.1-r4: 9′23″

Same here. My gentoo installation on my previous machine was setup as I bought the PC, somewhere around 2008.

I tried arch but it does not feel like home.

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