I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I’m happy with it so far.
Why did I switch?
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Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it’ll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.
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Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it’s around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.
Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?
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Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.
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Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It’s harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn’t a big issue for me most of the time.)
For now, I’ll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.
My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it’s probably not suitable for most.
You might be interested in trying Gentoo, which is what I use. The package manager is definitely not fast, but it is very powerful. You get a lot of NixOS-like powers, but it integrates seamlessly into the unix eco-system without NixOS’ overhead or its unorthodox approach that causes trouble sometimes. It also has first class support for compiler optimizations and global management of compile flags for packages.
So yeah, updates will not be fast at all, but the rest I think you’ll enjoy.
fwiw I really like nixOS. I like its ambitious approach. But I think it’s unorthodox approach is bound to cause issues. Most software has FHS and a typical Linux system in mind, and while nix solves those problems for most of them, there will always be something weird there.
I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I’m afraid it’ll compile for many days 😅
How many cores and how much RAM? I run gentoo on a raspberry pi 😄
A laptop with 8 GB of ram and 6 cores. I have only one machine that I use for work. That’s the main issueI. Need to find a free weekend to compile and try out gentoo 😅
I’d say your laptop is an ideal candidate for gentoo, especially if it’s at most 5 or so years old (it must then have hyper threading, so 12 virtual cores). It has just enough resources to compile packages with decent speed, but enough restriction that gentoo’s performance boost and optimizations will make a noticeable difference.
I actually have a laptop with the same resources as yours. Your compile times will not be as bad as you expect. Just make sure to use binary packages for big stuff, like browsers, the kernel, office suite, etc.
That’s quite convincing :) I’ve been meaning to try gentoo for many years actually. I’ll install it soon and report back!