Comment by emarthinsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emarthinsen | Hacker News Reader

I use NixOS as my daily driver. I concur. I wouldn't recommend it for most people (even for me, when I decided to give it a try). I'd probably just go Arch if I were to do it over again.

The concept behind Nix/NixOS is amazing, but it needs to be polished. Flakes are the future, but they are languishing in this experimental status. Even simple things like installing packages from stable and unstable channels are too hard to figure out. The documentation is terse and the community answers are often not enlightening.

A big complaint of mine is that the builds should be reproducible, but I find I sometimes need to run `nixos-rebuild switch` several times to get a successful build. The error messages mysteriously resolve themselves. For me, this doesn't pass the bar for being considered reproducible.

Don't get me started on using an NVIDIA graphics card also. Granted, part of my difficulties is that I was running Wayland, which doesn't have the best NVIDIA support, but I felt like I was just doing an exhaustive search through the potential config settings to see what worked. Ultimately, I found just the right combination of settings to get everything working buttery smooth. I ripped out the NVIDIA card and put an AMD card in.

Installing packages from different channels is still far easier than on any other distro. Try getting a Debian 10 package to work on Debian 13. You can't. GUI programs are hard because how GUIs work on Linux. You cannot make them easily pure, they always rely on the booted system through drivers and a bunch of impure things all over the place.

If the software you are using has race conditions in its build system then there is only so much you can do to fix that. You could for example run nothing in parallel with only one core but then everything would be painfully slow. Also the occasional network hickup breaks things. Lately also io_uring in combination with nodejs has been a great source for kernel bugs. You can only bang the software so much from the outside.

Nvidia is bad because Nvidia is bad but at least switching between different driver versions and variants is possible without leaving a trace of old things behind on your system like on literally any other distro.

After spending some time on NixOS I basically decided to hold off until flakes become official and the docs are written with them in mind. In the mean time I just run Arch with Nix home-manager and I'm happy.

I've developed enough good habits over the years that I don't get breakages, and home-manager allows me to easily sync my dotfiles across machines..

What makes you reluctant from using flakes? I initially thought I'd never have a need for flakes but after spending an hour on YouTube and Googling, I converted to flakes.

Sorry I was unclear. I’m using flakes, but I don’t want to commit to using NixOS proper until flakes actually get blessed as ready for prod. And yes I know everyone says they are, but I won’t be convinced until the experimental flag comes off.

If you are using more than 2 channels than flakes are the natural progression.

If you’re afraid of the experimental status, there are plethora of pinning solutions other than flakes which work with NixOS today and will continue working until roughly the end of time

My experience has been in complete agreement with yours: I love the theory, but the practice is so, so painful.

And yes, I also had to settle for your NVIDIA fix. I suspect I would have had a marginally better time on Arch as there are more people beating their heads against it and documenting how they made it work. NixOS documentation is piss-poor in comparison.

Most people don't realize that you can read the arch wiki and put the same settings into the nixos options. Where is the point in replicating that all again?

I don't know how to adapt those settings to the corresponding module - there are often differences in naming and hierarchy conventions - and there are other NixOS-specific considerations with regards to its shared-nothing architecture.

While it is technically possible to adapt the information in the Arch wiki to NixOS, you need a strong understanding of the software, how it was packaged for NixOS, and NixOS itself to do it effectively. Once you do figure it out, it's pretty straightforward, but that can be hours as opposed to minutes with Arch.

Modern modules often have a settings option which directly links to the upstream documentation and you basically write the options from upstream into the settings option.

I look all the time in all kind of sources and skip all the tedious and annoying installation steps and just look at the described configs.

My one big question about nix is how the hell do I find out those options? Like cool, I know I need to set the config to some specific value based on arch wiki, but how do I read the nix package to find out what config "key" to use? I've never been able to work out where these are defined

The key terms don’t change so I usually just grep Nixpkgs in nvim and usually have a lead on where to start. Obviously it’s a bit more work than copy/paste from the arch wiki but generally more popular config changes will have an nixos option available.

try https://search.nixos.org/options .

Or https://mynixos.com/ which is hierarchically navigable. I usually search for a package or setting name and browse around.

I look at the Nix definition for the relevant module as you often need to see what it's actually doing in order to understand it (yes, it's one of those ecosystems).

For example, for the `steam` program (not package - the package is a dummy): https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p... and then look for "lib.mk".

I'm on an NVIDIA Jetson, so I guess I'll just have to wait before this stuff becomes practically usable for me ...

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