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.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    For me it’s the fact that I have one source of truth for my whole system config that I can stick in git

    If I want to clean up software I don’t need anymore I just remove them from the package list and they’re gone next rebuild

    Also means when I reinstall or setup a new system I just run the installer, do a git pull, rebuild and I’ve instantly got all my tools, configured just how I like them

    Also, if I want to make a big change I can build my system in a VM first to make sure it works first (not that I do that because it also lets me revert to an earlier build from grub if I need to)

    I’ve also got both my laptop and my PC on basically identical configurations from the same git repo with each of them having a smaller config file for hardware specific stuff