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Comment by Valodim | Hacker News Reader

When you are tired hopping between different but similar distros, give NixOS a shot. No way back from there :)

> No way back from there :)

Presumably because it locks your bootloader or something, such that you are unable to wipe your PC once you're finally done pulling your hair out and ready to admit defeat? ;-)

No, it's because when you finally get all your things to work you don't want to upset it. It gets very angry.

Yeah, I noticed that this is a beast you do not want to disturb. But what I did not anticipate, is that the beast was also prone to disturbance by evolving dependencies.

Maybe it is a glimpse into what appeasing an unreasonable diety was like, back in the earlier times. We don't dare leave Dagon, but he is making our crops fail and we must figure out a way.

There’s a sense of order and tidiness in running Nix on multiple machines with diverse uses and hardware, all based on single configuration, that’s difficult to let go off once you’ve tried it.

It’s basically an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

For any nix-curious person out there check out Julia Evans posts [0]

But also note that she eventually moved out of it > (note from 18 months later in August 2024: I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me)

[0] https://jvns.ca/categories/nix/

Careful though, you might end up like me and add more and more machines, because setting up new machine is very satisfying with nixos

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