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Comment by thtmnisamnstr | Hacker News Reader

Did you use nixos for builds or as your daily driver (or both)? Using nixos as a daily driver doesn't make sense to me, but I'm probably missing something.

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I used NixOS for a while, but switched back to Debian. My pain point was that unless you also use Docker etc, deploying applications and deploying the system is inseparable. I don’t want to rebuild my system to update an app. This is especially painful on e.g. Raspberry Pi, because full deployments are expensive and you end up needing to set up VMs for building etc. The killer feature for me would be separable roots, so I could use multiple instances of NixOS on 1 system.

The other aspect is that declarative is nice, but often you care about preserving data as well. So you need backups etc. If you have full system backups, then separating config from data is more complex (and less useful). I’d rather spend my time on a rock solid and frequent backup strategy than worry about NixOS + a solid backup strategy.

I only have 1 server though. If I had more, then being declarative might be more useful. I currently use Nix for project dependencies, which is really nice.

> don’t want to rebuild my system to update an app.

You don't have to do that - there's lots of other options. (Although the system shouldn't rebuild if you don't update your channels, so the premise is interesting/suspicious.)

You can build your app independently against a pinned nixpkgs version. You can build the app and export/import that closure on another system. You can build the app itself using nix-build without engaging the nixos switch.

Building the app is not the problem, Nix adds minimal overhead for that. Deploying the app is annoying because changing a systemd service requires a nixos-rebuild, which is pretty slow on a Raspberry Pi.

There’s no good way to have an auto-updating non-NixOS systemd service on NixOS, because it’s not designed to co-exist with other things.

Also, NixOS is pretty much a DSL around systemd for this kind of thing. Systemd is already fairly declarative, so the indirection seems a bit unnecessary.

> Using nixos as a daily driver doesn't make sense to me

Many Nix enthusiasts use NixOS as a daily driver, and are very pleased with it.

I'd say some of the advantages are: the same 'elegance' from being able to declare how a package gets built carries over to being able to configure a system. -- e.g. for niche things like "setup Yubikey with PAM", I don't have to worry about what config settings to manually change, I can just update my config with that. (And my config is in a git repo; whereas "what changes I made" is not).

There are certainly significant drawbacks, sure; but I think the main decider between whether it makes sense is how appealing "take the time to write a config with changes" is vs "just run the command / edit the system file" is.

I had a windows machine that had outlook on and such and then a VM that was nixOS and i did all my dev work in it.

It was super nice to have everything configured in a single file that specified every detail of the OS. But some things were super hard (writing my own packages) and I slowly moved on.

I use it everywhere. Daily driver, VMs, and servers. I think it more than makes sense to use it this way. When I want to try to use some software I can checkout a new branch and try it out. If there are issues I can just revert back and everything is normal.

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