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My Story

When I started dabbling my feet in the Linux World 5 Years ago, it felt magical. Why? Well, before, it felt like I hit a ceiling with windows customization. Back then I had used a secondary keyboard with hotkeys akin to Taran Van Hermets. But it was clunky and unreliable. I tired to make windows prettier with tools like TranslucentTB or faster with tools similar to PowerToys Run, but these always just felt patched on and not like they should be there.

So I installed I believe, Lubuntu, and while that install didn’t last a day, seeing the bootup screen and something new, something unused to on the screen I had previously looked at day in day out was amazing. I quickly moved on to Arco Linux because my favorite YouTuber at the time was using it. When I got frustrated with every Arch guide only working 90%, because after all Arco was only based on Arch, I went full base Arch (btw). This allowed me to learn by reading the wiki for everything. Every time I came across something I didn’t know or understand, I wrote it down to read at a later date. Then, I don’t even fully remember why, I installed NixOS on a secondary (tertiary?) partition to try it out. The next 3 weeks were spent trying to recreate my arch setup. At some point, when they were equal, I deleted Arch. Then step by step I went deeper into the Nix rabbit hole: Flakes, Home-Manager, Git-Crypt, Sops, This site (moving away from docker), Nix-Shells, Nix-On-Droid, NixOS-WSL…

Why I probably won’t switch again

Now with my setup, I have everything (except League of Legends, but that’s probably a good thing). And due to the nature of NixOS, when I get a new computer at some point, I will not experience the joy of setting up everything, because I’ll just clone my config and after some minor edits and one command; I am done.

And while I portrayed this as a negative just now, this was the exact Idea I had when I deleted Arch. I knew that at some point I wouldn’t have the amount of time I had then. But I didn’t want to be the guy in 10 years with a default Debian install, cause he “didn’t get around to it yet”. NixOS, allows you to run bleeding edge, without every cutting yourself. It can be as unstable and up to date or LTS and stable as I want, It can even mix, and just have the fancy stuff updated often. When I mess something up, I can just roll back “because it worked yesterday”.

Another thing: I don’t even realize how well everything works until I see a cool Open Source project and 90% of the README is dedicated to how to install the damn thing, what dependencies you need, what versions of what utilities you need installed and so on. But all I have to do is look the name up on mynixos.com and if it has an option enable it.

I honestly don’t see a reason for other distros. Why would I use SUSE? Rocky? Void? Gentoo? All the things listed above one has to struggle with again. Not happening. This absolute and utter superiority of NixOS has made every alternative seem like a joke to me - so playing with the thought of switching is not fun anymore. NixOS is so good, it robbed the fun for me.

Still impossible to recommend

But here is the thing: I still can’t recommend my friends NixOS when they ask me what distro to run. Because for many things on NixOS, you need to know how to do them in “normal” Linux, if that makes sense. Like you need to know what /etc/hosts does, and the syntax of it, before you edit netwotking.extraHosts. And if my friend didn’t go through 2 years of religiously reading the Arch Wiki, they will not be able to make NixOS work for themselves, and instead get frustrated and quit.