Table of contents
Our first date
When I migrated from Manjaro to Arch Linux, I have discovered the heaven of Linux customisation, the possibility to rice my system. And it was also the time that I’ve found the r/unixporn subreddit.
Since my childhood, I’ve always been dreaming about an operating system that I could make my own thing, customising every possible thing as I wish. With the time, I’ve had suddenly abandoned the usual Desktop Environments and have started using a window manager. Then, I’ve also started using some cool pieces of libre software, like GNU Emacs, Vim, git and et cetera, later on I started to notice something whilst playing with Emacs configurations, that my system was so customised at that point that I would have to spend hours and hours only to build that same environment again in another machine, imagine if I have to format my disk or change my machine, I don’t know, someday I would have to reset my system and then find out that it’s impossible to remember every change I’ve made in all this years. Why not have a operating system with declarative configuration system like Emacs or other CLI programs? That was the start of my passion with NixOS.
I’ve had watched some Emacs tutorials at System Crafters at the time and there I’ve heard about GNU Guix , which is a declarative operating system and package manager, I’ve really liked the idea, however I’m not a big fan of Lisp, and Guix uses a Lisp dialect called Guile Scheme for its configuration and package recipes, and another annoying detail is that Guix has no proprietary software on its repositoreis, only libre software.
Although I’ve found an incredible alternative to GuixOS, my current declarative operating system: NixOS ❄️.
And why would I use Nix + NixOS?
You might be thinking “Why would I distrohop to a new system?”. On this section I’m going to give you some very good reasons.
1. It’s astonishing stable
If you are like me, you will love the nix “package manager”, it’s like the midterm between stability and rolling-release updates, you may choose to use the stable or unstable channels, depending on your needs, the first one being a debian-like stable branch with pinned derivations (packages) versions that updates every time in a while with new NixOS version releases, and the second one being an arch-like rolling-release channel that updates regurlaly with new merged changes on the Nix repositories, which is great for developers, and you can even use both channels at the same time, installing unstable derivations of specific programs. Anyway, you’re going to experience a great stability even if you choose the unstable channel, since you may always rollback to a previous version of your system.
Once you get a stable state you will never loose it unless you manually remove the old generation or use the nix garbage collector to free up some space.
2. It’s reproducible
It means that once you write down your system configuration you can carry it everywhere you go and re-create your current system in any machine with all the packages and modifications you like, and that’s my favourite aspect of the system and the reason I’ve decided to distrohop from Arch Linux to it.
Being able to reproduce my system without having to keep track of every change I’ve made to it, or all the packages I’ve installed with its optional dependencies and et cetera is a lifesaver feature, it literally saves a lot of lifetime.
3. It has a vast repository
The major reason for Arch Linux to be so popular is its AUR (Arch User Repository) which is a giant software repository maintained by the users, and it’s one of the main reasons for people to love Arch Linux, the AUR has so many packages, it’s unbeliavable, every possible software you would think is probably available there.
And NixOS is not far from this same accomplish, having the 2nd largest software repository available with its community constantly pushing new additions and changes, growing it even more. Once you understand the basics of the nix syntax you ought to be able to push your own package definitions, I’ve been playing around in the NixOS repository by looking other people commits and I have added some packages as well, like ctpv (a file previewr for lf) and tym , it was a fun experience and the community was really nice and helpful.
You will probably always find the software you like, doesn’t matter if it’s a free or proprietary one.
4. You may have multiple environments and software versions
If you are a software developer or an avid linux enthusiast you know the pain called the dependency hell, when some software packages depends on specific version of other software packages, which makes it impossible for you to have an older or newer version of the same package and makes it difficult for you to have various packages that depends on different version of the same software. However on Nix it works differently, every package has its own “space” with separeted dependencies, and don’t worry, Nix is smart enough to hardlink the same dependencies between softwares, which saves a lot of space on your system.
You will never worry about dependencies and software versions anymore, with Nix shells you also have access to a reproducible development environment for every different project, making it easy to bring your development environment into any machine that has Nix installed.
5. Virtual machines!
If you have made a change to your system configuration and don’t want to deploy it to your current system (you have other options to test changes, like switching to a new generation of your system temporarily) you can just build a virtual machine with a NixOS command and it will work out-of-the-box!
Looks like magic, right?
Reasons to not use Nix and NixOS…
I really recommend you to learn this amazing, astonishing and beautiful piece of software, but there is some minor reasons that may dishearten you.
- You will need to learn a new language and maybe a new paradigm.
The Nix langugage that we use to either write configurations and derivations for Nix and NixOS is a totally unique programming language, and it’s a functional and declarative one, so you might not be used to how the syntax and things in general works with that. My recommendation is to learn by trying, the reward will be greater than the challenge. However if you are already used to this kind of programming languages, it will be very easy to get accostumed.
- Lack of documentation
There’s not too much official documentation about NixOS, and it’s something that the developers and the community are working hard to fix, I really miss the Arch Wiki and sometimes I still go there to learn and fix new problems. On NixOS most of the documentation is reading the code yourself and trying to figure out what’s happening there, but you always have the newborn NixOS Wiki and the great NixOS Discourse Forum.
Afterwords
The purpose of this post wasn’t to be a in depth guide or introduction to NixOS or its features, but to convince you that it’s a great choice depending on your needs. For me, it is a revolutionary way of doing things, making a system customisation a lot easier since the changes will always be saved somewhere, and easy to deploy without the use of complicated scripts or any other workarounds.
If you are convinced, that’s great for you, I’ve done my job and I hope you enjoy your journey in this new concept of operating system.
There’ll be some important links below for you to dive down and understand better how it works beforing moving to it. it is also possible to only install the Nix package manager on your current operating systems with all the great functionalities, like reproducible development environments, rollback, different version and much more.
