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Comment by iamcurious | Hacker News Reader

I have been using it for a while as my main OS. So far it has been great. There are a few warts, like any distro, but with NixOS the fixes tends to get written in the main configuration file, instead of scattered among many files. That meant a lot when I had to install it in another machine. 1) Install NixOS with my configuration file. 2) Copy dot files to home 3) There is no step 3) !

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How have you found package support? The quality/breadth of packages available in ArchLinux AUR would stop me from using any other distro.

Arch's primary package set contains the standard set - which I assume is similar to NixOS - but all of packages requiring tricky/custom configuration tend to be in AUR. Which has saved me on a number of occasions from having to follow pages of tutorials that you'd normally have to follow in order to install things when using Linux for a desktop.

For example, setting up nice fonts with great default settings in Arch is a single AUR package away.

Arch is great. The only reason I switched away from it were the occasional manual intervention updates which could just mess up your system if you weren't paying attention.

Eventually I kept the install ISO on a USB key for those situations. My main issue is how often I felt like I had to update.

and here i am on debian stable. always complaining i can't update often enough. But thanks to comments like this i'm happy again :)

good news is that it will be some 4 years until i have DRM on firefox... i mean iceweasel.

I do have a rescue USB like you. We should write something for arch to get rollbackable system.

ps: while googling for it, I discovered https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Rollback_Machine

I was great with Arch on USB, until I started trying to boot to a full UI from the image, and I'd start getting I/O errors from the ramdisk halfway through a 'pacman -Sy plasma-meta' (last three iso releases). That was a dealbreaker for me.

I switched to KaOS (because they used pacman), but their install image fails to install before creating users and installing grub, so I'm back to a Gentoo LiveUSB, which doesn't fail.

Every time I leave gentoo, I'm eventually forced back. maybe Nix will be better.

I currently use Arch, but would like to switch to Nix.

A main practical issue is that Nix packages are often built with all possible options vs Arch minimal packaging philosophy. In practice you install something as innocent as mutt, and python comes as a dependency!

I can't imagine a scenario where having python installed on a Linux desktop with non-ancient hardware would be a drawback.

For a traditional package manager the drawback is that your version of python is now tied to your email client and can't be upgraded separately. As I understand it this is the value of NixOS, that one can have multiple versions of e.g. python side by side...

My current Arch install doesn't have Python (because I don't need to), and I explicitly installed the same packages as in Nix.

This is just an example that some of their packaging policies are a bit odd, but they are working on this. Imagine using Nix on an embedded device. All those extra dependencies might make a difference in terms of resources used.

>My current Arch install doesn't have Python (because I don't need to),

That still doesn't explain why installing python is such a big deal for you, or why your desire to not install python is stronger than your desire to install mutt.

I don't see your point. On Debian, which has the most traditional package manager in the world, I can still easily install several versions of Python at the same time.

I'm not even sure what you mean by "your version of python is now tied to your email client and can't be upgraded separately". As long as the deps for each package are satisfied, either one can be upgraded.

Cool! Can you share your NixOS configuration file?

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