I’ve been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn’t see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.

So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I’m still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.

It’s clear that I’m missing something so please help me understand what it is.

  • nomen_dubium@feddit.de
    0·
    8 months ago

    (don’t know if arch supports this natively now but) declarative package managment is why j started using it… having ansible/terraform basically be a part of the os is great for me because a reinstall of the current running system just means i copy my configuration.nix and i’m back to where i was but fresh…

    another thing is build isolation (you can have clashing dependencies without issues because each package specifically links to the dependencies it needs)… it does kind of bloat the disk a bit, but it also shares dependencies of the same version across packages so it’s not like flatpack (if i understand that correctly)