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Comment by sevenzero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Literally.

Elk nadeel heb se voordeel.

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

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