Arch is a gateway drug to NixOS | Hacker News Reader

Arch is a gateway drug to NixOS

wastedintel.ca

31 pointswasted_intel13 comments

I’m not sure I agree with the article.

Arch is especially nice because it has best in class documentation and vanilla packages. The installation is a bog standard chroot and use package manager like Gentoo had for ages or an old school Debian. Arch is nice because it’s as vanilla as a Linux distribution can be.

NixOS is the polar opposite of that: basically no documentation, weird behaviours everywhere, custom configuration, custom file system. Pretty much as far removed from Arch as something can be.

Yeah. As someone trying to find the time to migrate back to Arch from NixOS... I understand how Arch drives you to want to make things bespoke and just so and reproduceable, but NixOS adds a ton of complexity and problems without ever really getting there.

This doesn't mirror my experience at all. I think the biggest challenge facing NixOS is the learning curve. There's a lot thrown at you from the start, and as you start to factor your configuration into separate modules, there's a lot of complexity you have to unpack.

I've since migrated to a flake-based setup with machine-based variations (for my laptop and desktop), including easily swappable desktop environments. At a whim, I can switch between sway, hyprland, and gnome. This was mostly a result of me exploring/tweaking these without wanting to discard the configs; I always end up coming back to re-explore tiling WMs.

My experience through all of this has been great. I've even done a full re-install on both machines when the xz vulnerability was discovered and the process was effortless. That includes lanzaboote for SecureBoot, LUKS, and out-of-tree git-based flake builds for custom applications I build from source.

The one thing I found really helpful when starting with flakes was this repo that includes starter configs to help flatten that initial curve: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs/tree/main

Right, plus arch is rolling release which lends itself to never reinstalling the OS.

The installation on my laptop is on its 4th hardware refresh. Rsync or brtfs send to a new box, modify the partition UUIDs, rebuild the initial ram disk, and you're on you're merry way.

That is sort of true. Definitely over something like Ubuntu with fixed cycles and often unreliable version upgrades. But I think NixOS is never re-installing on the next level.

But after about 5 years I would start having problems on my Arch installs and realize that some config I edited years ago is now causing a problem. I have to see if I should revert to the default config or merge in changes and if I need a new workaround. Overall the system was just accumulating cruft that ended up biting me. I never knew what configs I had edited and what the default was, experimenting was annoying forms of backing up the config, making changes and then figuring out what I actually changed.

NixOS is completely different because all of my "customizations" live in a Git repo. I have change history and it is trivial to remove things that aren't needed anymore and know I did a clean job. The concept of a re-install even doesn't even make sense. Every config change or update is just as clean as a re-install would be other than "state" like a database or my documents.

There are definitely a lot of differences between NixOS and arch such as many packages requiring patches to function at all or as expected. But "never reinstall" was a significant part of my ramp from Arch to NixOS.

> some config I edited years ago is now causing a problem.

Yeah, that's a fair point. You do get in the habit of occasionally diffing your config file against the ones with the .pacnew extension. As well as purging packages.

Arch is something a fairly non DIY user can easily conquer and use for many years and it will just work. As long as they don't choose to do anything exotic, they can use it basically forever.

NixOS is nothing like that, there's limited docs, the docs are sometimes just RTFM that links to another RTFM and oh yeah don't be afraid of breaking userspace because userspace is doing something wrong. It's fine for some of us who can of course get shit done.

Ultimately, I think some subset of Arch users who really wanted to be Gentoo users but weren't because "drama" and then NixOS scratches that itch.

I also think NixOS is more targeted towards developers. It’s one thing to learn the syntax, APIs, and abstractions of Nix/NixOS. It’s another to stack all of that on top of learning programming in general.

As always in Linux at home, “something exotic” here means using Bluetooth at all.

Bluetooth isn't too bad. Biometric auth is where it gets fun.

Daily drive NixOS (Hyprland) with totally seamless biometric (face/fingerprint) lock/suspend and Bluetooth.

If one takes the time to learn the Nix language (and set up a working LSP), it's a totally painless experience, and if you are a fan of systems that just work, it's life affirming. It's stability is unparalleled.

I would never go back to any other distro.

Guix System is my happy medium between non-functional Arch and documentation-less NixOS.

The nix wiki is not the arch wiki sure, but y’all talking about documentation issues with nix.. what are you talking about. The getting started guides plus the nix wiki made getting running system easy.

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