I, like many other NixOS users, fully understand your sentiments. Let me explain why I stick with it and use it in all of my computers.
First off, I have a quite special environment for work. I like to customize many aspects of my desktop, and having my environments on other machines to work similarly is a tedious task, especially when having more than two computers you use daily. NixOS solves this issue very well.
What makes it hard is how docs are not that great for Nix or NixOS. What all of us have to do is to read other people's dotfiles and the nixpkgs monorepo to understand how things work and what can you do with it. It is extremely hard in the beginning, even for people like me with over 20 years of Linux experience. It took me about six months to finally being able to get it.
There are some new terms you hear when you first start using NixOS. One is flakes, that is very vague and academic at first, but when you understand what it does it is almost as hard to go back to Nix without them as it is for seasoned NixOS user to go back to using other operating systems. With flakes, you have two files:
- `flake.nix` lists inputs, such as git repositories, of nix build instructions for fetching packages and functions to your system.
- `flake.lock` is like your normal `Cargo.lock` that sets the exact commits of all inputs, freezing the versions of all software in your system.
This means I can mix things really nicely in my system. I can use the master branch of Sway, the pgtk version of Emacs with Wayland support from the emacs version control (not even master branch) and mix and match things from different NixOS versions. I can even fork the NixOS monorepo, do some changes and add them to all of my systems before my PR gets merged.
The `flake.lock`, which I commit to my repository, forces every single computer I have to use exactly these versions of the software with the configuration I give. It will always lead to the exact same result when I `nixos-rebuild switch`. When I want to update my packages, I go to the repo and say `nix flake update`, then switch to the new versions and only if everything worked with the new packages, I commit the `flake.lock` and it works everywhere else the same.
The other nice thing I learned, is while at first the nixpkgs feels like a crazy mess and hard to grasp, it is actually one of the best package repositories I've used. Being a package maintainer is easy and a PR that follows good coding standards gets merged to the main repository no matter how experienced Nix developer you are. See my first package I started to maintain:
These 23 lines of nix will fetch the package with the given tag from GitHub, check the file download SHA256 sum matches the given, check the vendored libraries SHA256 sum matches the given and then will just use the system `buildGoModule` function to compile the package and put it to your system. When their CI catches changes here, it will build a binary cache for the derivation, so most users won't even need to compile anything, but get a binary derivation with exactly the same result as compiling it by themselves.
And it's easy to see what gets added to your system. You can see the repo and read the code. You can use your editor, go on top of `buildGoModule` call and jump to definition, and you can read the definition what the function does. Now some users are running bots that just go through many packages in the nix repo, change the versions and SHA sums if they have updates and automatically generate pull requests, saving the maintainers the work to do it manually.
I understand this is not for everyone. But I hope I also could make you understand why there is no way of going back to systems like Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Windows or macOS after getting some proper taste how to do things with NixOS.
First off, I have a quite special environment for work. I like to customize many aspects of my desktop, and having my environments on other machines to work similarly is a tedious task, especially when having more than two computers you use daily. NixOS solves this issue very well.
What makes it hard is how docs are not that great for Nix or NixOS. What all of us have to do is to read other people's dotfiles and the nixpkgs monorepo to understand how things work and what can you do with it. It is extremely hard in the beginning, even for people like me with over 20 years of Linux experience. It took me about six months to finally being able to get it.
There are some new terms you hear when you first start using NixOS. One is flakes, that is very vague and academic at first, but when you understand what it does it is almost as hard to go back to Nix without them as it is for seasoned NixOS user to go back to using other operating systems. With flakes, you have two files:
- `flake.nix` lists inputs, such as git repositories, of nix build instructions for fetching packages and functions to your system.
- `flake.lock` is like your normal `Cargo.lock` that sets the exact commits of all inputs, freezing the versions of all software in your system.
This means I can mix things really nicely in my system. I can use the master branch of Sway, the pgtk version of Emacs with Wayland support from the emacs version control (not even master branch) and mix and match things from different NixOS versions. I can even fork the NixOS monorepo, do some changes and add them to all of my systems before my PR gets merged.
The `flake.lock`, which I commit to my repository, forces every single computer I have to use exactly these versions of the software with the configuration I give. It will always lead to the exact same result when I `nixos-rebuild switch`. When I want to update my packages, I go to the repo and say `nix flake update`, then switch to the new versions and only if everything worked with the new packages, I commit the `flake.lock` and it works everywhere else the same.
The other nice thing I learned, is while at first the nixpkgs feels like a crazy mess and hard to grasp, it is actually one of the best package repositories I've used. Being a package maintainer is easy and a PR that follows good coding standards gets merged to the main repository no matter how experienced Nix developer you are. See my first package I started to maintain:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...
These 23 lines of nix will fetch the package with the given tag from GitHub, check the file download SHA256 sum matches the given, check the vendored libraries SHA256 sum matches the given and then will just use the system `buildGoModule` function to compile the package and put it to your system. When their CI catches changes here, it will build a binary cache for the derivation, so most users won't even need to compile anything, but get a binary derivation with exactly the same result as compiling it by themselves.
And it's easy to see what gets added to your system. You can see the repo and read the code. You can use your editor, go on top of `buildGoModule` call and jump to definition, and you can read the definition what the function does. Now some users are running bots that just go through many packages in the nix repo, change the versions and SHA sums if they have updates and automatically generate pull requests, saving the maintainers the work to do it manually.
I understand this is not for everyone. But I hope I also could make you understand why there is no way of going back to systems like Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Windows or macOS after getting some proper taste how to do things with NixOS.
Here's my config so far:
https://github.com/pimeys/nixos
I'd like to see other configs from nix users too if you're still here!