<story><title>NixOS Linux</title><url>https://nixos.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chaorace</author><text>I played with NixOS and am willing to admit that it was too difficult. It&amp;#x27;s probably great for devops, but it&amp;#x27;s just &lt;i&gt;slightly&lt;/i&gt; too rigid for my own personal use.&lt;p&gt;Let me give an example: let&amp;#x27;s say you want to use xmonad on top of Plasma. NixOS doesn&amp;#x27;t have any simple way to configure that. You have the mutually exclusive options for one or the other, basically.&lt;p&gt;I know Nix &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; powerful enough to do this, if I wanted to go offroad and create custom packages&amp;#x2F;derivations, but that&amp;#x27;s the point where I am no longer happy with the utility&amp;#x2F;work tradeoff. It&amp;#x27;s what ultimately sent me packing back over to arch.&lt;p&gt;When I came back to arch, I was left hankering for NixOS&amp;#x27;s declarative package management, if that could be somehow reconciled with the baseline arch package system. This led me to using the aconfmgr utility, which checks in packages and system configuration files into a home-based filetree.&lt;p&gt;Once you&amp;#x27;ve got it set up, aconfmgr can regenerate your current configuration from scratch, declaratively! I was able to check the aconfmgr tree into my dotfiles repo, so now it tracks my home state AND my system state. Unlike Nix, this still uses file-based configuration, but it&amp;#x27;s all versioned and fully reproducible, so I no longer particularly care about that caveat.</text></comment>
<story><title>NixOS Linux</title><url>https://nixos.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>0xCMP</author><text>If you want to get in to Nix I think two important things to note:&lt;p&gt;1. Nix is not a &amp;quot;package manager&amp;quot; and I think it&amp;#x27;s better at first to not think of it as one because you&amp;#x27;ll assume how it works incorrectly. It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a package manager, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t have the same workflow as yarn or etc. That trips a lot of people up.&lt;p&gt;2. You &lt;i&gt;need to read&lt;/i&gt; the Nix Pills documentation. It is not long and guides you through every abstraction so you understand from the basics how it works. Nix is actually pretty self descriptive. I setup my home&amp;#x27;s Linux Router entirely by just hacking and searching through the nixpkgs repo without understanding things, but if I&amp;#x27;d read the Nix Pills things would have been so much clearer to me. Especially when debugging or reading through what a derivation was doing.</text></comment>