I have been thinking about switching to NixOS because of the great things I keep hearing about it. I would enjoy reading reviews from HNers, has anyone used it as a desktop?
That's the hardest part about nix right now (the lack of packaged software). It is pretty easy to write your own packages for basic software though (and the Nix project is good about taking pull requests).
Looks like gnome3 is packaged now, I'll have to give it another shot: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/s...
We know that implicit state and mutation are terrible in the programming world why not extend that philosophy to your entire OS?
You might be missing some packages so make sure to check this:
http://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html
before installing.
It's still early for NixOS, the OS is solid but it's likely you'll need to package up a program or two (but it's not difficult)
I was pretty unhappy learning how to write the strange config language at first, but I've made my peace with it. You will almost certainly need to write a package or two, but there's a lot of active development to learn from, and lots of example to cargo cult.
On the cool side: Nix is the first linux distro I've contributed to, because it's the standard "hack, fork, pull request" process that most github-hosted open source projects use these days.
The biggest thing is that you absolutely have to drink the nix koolaid if you're going to run nixos. You can't really do the normal ./configure && make && make install, because paths to libraries are all non-standard. But once it all really clicks, it's pretty great.
As far as desktop goes, the rest of this thread rings true for me too: most of the important things are there, like desktop environments, window managers, browsers, etc. There are occasionally niche/older packages that are not available. If you're willing to learn a little bit of nix language, it's relatively straightforward to add most packages.
I've written a few thoughts about nix at http://chriswarbo.net/essays/nixos/
* Default packages are compiled with all the dependencies
* The configuration language is a functional programming language, and that's a plus, but the syntax is quiet weird, not similar to ML, Haskell nor Lisp.
* some command line tools are cryptic at best, for example searching for available packages is done with nix-env -qa \* -P | fgrep -i "$1"
The hardest part about going all in is of you find some of the software you rely on not being packaged. There's just no way to "cheat" and ./configure && make'ing for way around: you have to learn the Nix language and package the software yourself. (Which can arguably be said to be a viral feature for getting more software packaged)
To me this was too much work to fit in an otherwise busy weekend and I just had to give up. Had I had more time to do things properly, I would probably have stuck with it.
The concepts it introduces are quite nice and well executed.
I highly recommend it. :-)
What ever happened to Linux folks mocking Windows' registry from back in the day :)
Mind you, I used Gentoo for many years before ubuntu, so I'm used to rolling breakage. Sid is a lot more stable than Gentoo (circa 2010)
Kernel modules are the main things that deteriorate, mostly the GPU support. It's normally a matter of changing the kernel version (I freeze the kernel every time I remember about it) or removing some old package that isn't permitting a clean upgrade.
Last time I reinstalled a desktop was in 2007 (I had 3, now I only have 2), because a Windows machine got a virus at the same LAN, and I wanted to be sure it didn't get anywhere. Last time I reinstalled a laptop was during the setup of my new one, this year, because I got a pretty messed-up set of kernel packages, and decided it were easier to just start from scratch.
Ubuntu solemnly annoyed me by botching every upgrade and forcing me to reinstall every half-year. It was window-esque...