Hi, everybody!

I’ve been toying with the idea of switching to NixOS for some time. I’m currently on arch (6 months), and while I like the idea of a minimal, only-what-I-want-installed, hackable system with the newest packages, I think having a system that always works, even if an update goes south, is more important to me.

Now, I’m still not sure if I should switch. There are some issues I’m worried about, maybe unnecessarily.

For one, what are the trade-offs of switching from Arch? Anything I have to watch out for? I’ve heard there are some issues with regard to the FSH and gaming, or just FSH in general, or just gaming in general. Secondly, the dotfiles. I hear there is the Home Manager for that, but it doesn’t have support for everything, so some files would need to be managed in other ways. Is there a way to manage everything at the same time? Even better if everything is in configuration.nix. I thought of using env.etc.xxx.source and .text to link the dotlifes to the etc folder and change the contents, but it feels… cheap and unsafe to do that. Third, are flakes really that important? I hear about them everywhere, I haven’t researched them yet, but I’m curious what the fuss is about.

Let me know if there is anything else I should consider. I mainly game, watch videos and sometimes play with the system if needed. I’m not sure if I really want to switch, or is it just “oooo, new shiny and cool” thing lol

Thanks :)

  • @sloppy_diffuserEnglish
    6•3 months ago

    It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach. I wanted to switch to Nix but got lost way in the weeds with declarative partitioning, immutable OS with impermanence and snapshots, fucking coding my own gnome shell with AGS/Astal for Hyprland, and making overrides for bleeding edge software updates from GitHub.

    Realising it was going to be a hot minute before I had a daily driver OS, I started using Home Manager on my Ubuntu daily drivers and installing NixOS on some spare hardware to tinker with.

    The majority of the apps I use are now managed through Nix the package manager on all my Linux systems.

    I do use flakes and what’s installed on Ubuntu is managed with the same files as my NixOS builds. So far I’m really happy with it.