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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

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Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.

Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?

The nix website doesn't have the sentence that Claude gave you above, but it does describe the declarative approach to package management that nix is known for. "Having a single config file" doesn't really even describe what makes nix unique. Perhaps you should have read the website instead of skimming and asking Claude.

You're making the same mistake again. I saw NixOS and I wanted to know what kind kernel it is running on first. Why? Because the post title is talking about a Windows alternative, not a package manager.

The website nixos.org talks immediately about package management, which does not help with answering if it is a viable Windows alternative. It is like saying Apt or RPM is an alternative to Windows.

Whereas you are coming to it knowing what NixOS is, so already have the context. Clearly whoever wrote NixOS.org was the same. A pretty site for people who already know what Nix is.... which is a very very common pattern for open source projects. A nice front page mantra for true believers, but useless for outsiders.

Claude actually explained it all to me but I forced it to summarise it down. That is enough for all the people on this thread, who don't know what NixOS is to see that they are pushing a Linux distro as an alternative to Windows.

That's the wrong domain...

So it is. Interesting pattern to state it is wrong, but not our the correct one. I'll join in

Nixos.org

NixOS is also unnecessarily complicated and it's easy for someone that doesn't want to read 1000 pages of documentation to brick your system.

Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.

For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.

The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.

When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.

Elk nadeel heb se voordeel.

Literally.

That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)

How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.

Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.

The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.

I managed to brick my revisions/snapshots before

Sure you can make a bad one, but you can always switch to a different one.

I meant it as in: I bricked all previous snapshots while also having bricked the one I had selected, so I bricked my whole system.

So far I have broken every Linux distro I used except NixOS.

And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.

And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.

I would image in corporate / government deployment, declarative configuration is more efficient.

When you have that many users, you don't really configure individual system, you deploy up some per-configured module or setup.

Repeatable builds also make troubleshooting lots easier - and you can hand those task to front-tier helpdesk staffs.

I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.

Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)

Sounds like a good replacement

Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.

Arch is easier to start of with, NixOS is easier to maintain, especially at scale

Hopefully the config is a little more descriptive than their README.md

It looks like a lot of nothing. All the READMEs are empty. What is being contributed here?

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