Post #1640512

2026-02-12 07:26 UTC

@ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario I tried nixOS back in 2023 and it was still too raw for me to use as my primary OS. The nix scripting language also seemed a bit inelegant. Then there was the matter of having any given application available as a nix(pkg). Looking now, the website looks slick, and it looks like nixOS has matured and stabilized. So I am thinking of giving it another go. What is your feeling on the current state of nix? Especially, the nix pkg selection?

Replies (2)

@krutonium@social.treehouse.systems 2026-02-12 07:35

@purrperl @ar @abmurrow @rperezrosario As a Nix user since 2020ish, package selection is bigger than ever, both literally in terms of having everything I want, and numerically; with more than Arch + AUR. The language is largely unchanged, and the learning curve is still quite rough. If you can get used to the language though it's a solid way to manage an OS though.

Open ##1640513
@ar@is-a.cat 2026-02-12 07:40

@purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario I've been using it since late 2019/early 2020, and - tbh - I didn't notice too many dramatic changes. The nix language is still a somewhat weird functional programming language. The learning curve is a bit rough if you're not used to functional programming languages. REPL in the "official" implementation needs some love; one of the forks - Lix - mostly fixes REPL in my experience, and can be used on regular NixOS installations. In my first few weeks/months of using NixOS i was treating configuration.nix as just a silly json, with a slightly different syntax. I think that's a good approach to limit the number of things to learn at the same time. Flatpak and docker work on nixos, for the things that aren't packaged. AppImage sometimes need some work. The number of packages in nixpkgs did grow.

Open ##1640515