Almost Went Back: One Month on NixOS

"What I had been calling “Linux knowledge” was actually two different things bundled together: understanding of how systems work, and familiarity with where things live on a particular filesystem. The first transfers perfectly to NixOS. The second becomes largely irrelevant, and whilst that felt like a loss at first, I now think it is fine. Knowing that configuration files live under /etc is useful context, but it is not deep understanding. Deep understanding is knowing what the configuration does and why, and that knowledge is entirely portable."

Particularly: >> "familiarity with where things live on a particular filesystem."

Taken in context with mightyiam's quote: >> "because I get to keep it, share it across multiple computers, "

It seems to me like a primary advantage of NixOS is that familiarity with where things live on your particular filesystem is made to be portable across machines, and not a constant beachead.

For me, it was easier to just continue to use Ansible for machine reproducibility. I really like the thought behind Nix but I felt like I needed to elbows deep in it 24/7 to really grok it. And if I stopped looking at Nix for 6 months, then that knowledge just disappeared. I migrated away from NixOS for my homelab because I would come back to flakes I had written and not understand how anything worked and couldn't be bothered to relearn. I know that Ansible and Nix can sometimes be apple and oranges but I know that I can come back to a playbook and understand what it does even if I haven't touched Ansible for years.

Call me naive, but why not natively run the Nix package manager side-by-side with pacman. This allows one to safely use tools like Home Manager to manage their user environment and dotfiles declaratively while leaving the core Arch Linux base completely untouched.

Hyprland will bite you in the bum soon

They changed their config to lua, so no more hyprland.conf good thing nix has rollbacks !

Maybe migrate sooner rather than later

Not really touched on here, but one thing I found very useful in switching to nix is having your entire system defined in a single repo opens it up for very nice agentic setups. Claude code can now configure my whole system, debug my gpu issues, install software etc, and I can simply git diff to inspect the changes and apply if I agree. On arch sometimes Bluetooth not working or my fingerprint scanner not working becomes some hours of debugging, now I can solve these issues trivially, and if it doesn't work I can restore to an earlier point instead of trails of attempts left through my imperative system