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.
That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.
Yeah there’s a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.
In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a “fresh install” on every reboot.
edit: I do feel norawibb’s point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.
🎉 Same! I’ve been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.
Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS’s, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.
For reproducible configuration in the Arch world, there’s a project which always looks good to me: aconfmgr
https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr
I think Arch+aconfmgr+yadm+btrfs == a pretty solid arrangement.
Though I’m of course itching for first class Bcachefs support…
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
Can you give an example in what kind of scenario you would want “identical servers”? In my head that is where tools like ansible come into play…?
You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.
Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.
The great thing about Nix is that it achieves reproducibility with the package manager. Container and Ansible depend on taking a system and documenting steps to bring it to the desired state. This state then might deviate over time (e.g. crashing while updating).
But yes, for most practical use it probably doesn’t make much of a difference. For me Nix forces me to document what I’m doing, which I might not do for “quick and simple change” on other systems.
My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I’m forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.
That’s right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)
It’s definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)
Cool that you mention also the other contender OS in that regard. Interestingly you both chose Void as your comparison…I would be curious to why? @[email protected]
I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it’s new and an independent distro. I’ll try the other two some day.
I sense a dislike for systemd. :D Actually didn’t know alpine is gentoo based. Thanks for your insight.
It is not. Alpine is independant and uses a ports-like packaging system.
ports as in BSD?
Yes.
I was just going off based on its history. It began based on gentoo. (Wikipedia) but yea it is independent now.
In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.
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Are there any tradeoffs I need to accept to use this?
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Thanks a lot. I will give it a try. By the way, are you also using the NUR? Do you maybe know if I can configure the
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Not really, but you should update your flake every once in a while to get the latest packages
Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It’s just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.
Does Nix have Guix-style grafts? I know that in theory that is how Guix lessens the minor-update-to-core dependency problem. But I only use Guix for dev environments so I don’t know how well it works in practice.
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yeah that’s currently in the works (ca-derivations)
How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.
Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years ago 😆
One year approximatively. But I elaborate a bit, I installed the minimal version, because I use bspwm. I had issues since the tty log in. Probably the xfce iso is OK.
Yep. I used the Xfce iso.
Did you follow their docs ? Read page by page and everything should work fine.
VM. Always practice new systems in a VM. Took me half a dozen tries to get a fuckup-free Void install in a VM but only one on the actual hardware.
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.
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!
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 also haven’t noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.
I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven’t really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it’s hard to say.
I’d definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.
( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )
Thank you that makes sense. When I get my hands on a more powerful machine and have less data constraints, I’ll try Nixos again. I do miss it sometimes 😆
Very reasonable and insightful write up. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you!
I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies
Is this sarcasm?
It has to be! No one can hate themselves so much they deliberately go out of their way to use something needlessly slow
I dispute the needlessly part. NixOS unstable has very new packages, do you’re getting some fresh updates before some other packaging systems.
Is it less “efficient” than waiting for major versions? Of course. But I’m willing to run an update in the background on my desktop to get that new software.
That really depends on what kind of computer you are using and how fast your internet connection is. Also a desktop computer should be (for most people) as little maintanance work as possible and having long update/install times really stands in the way of that.
Why? If it’s installing singing in the background it’s not stopping me from doing my work
Yeah I guess so then all those that remain are the benefits of Nixos 👍
I know you haven’t used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?
I’m asking because I’m using an arch based distro, but I’ve been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they’re worth trying.
Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.
Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.
I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.
Could you also share the differences you perceived between Arch and Void ?
Void feel faster on old hardware due to systemd missing, the real problem is no-AUR imo.
Systemd won’t make anything slower once the system is booted up, it’s barely doing anything.
Benefit. If you never used AUR before and never felt the need to use it.
I don’t need a lot from the AUR, but a few packages I can’t dl without. Tbf those would be in the official repos in other distros like fedora. I’ve got some weird bugs with fedora though. I just use endeavourOS cause it’s so hassle free. One of the best distros period.
I love EndeavorOS. It is basically just Arch plus 20 packages but it makes such a difference.
Other than the obvious things like arch having better docs and lots of packages, void reminds me of arch before systemd. Especially editing rc.conf etc.
I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?
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Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.
edit: this isn’t arguing against him, i’ve heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.
You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?
What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?
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Wat? I wasn’t attacking him, I was telling my experience.
He is assuming that you are trying to win an argument and seeing your strategic approach to doing so. It is kind of implied that you want to win the argument without having to defend your position or even be right.
I did not get that from your comment. It felt like you were more genuinely surprised to see others relating experiences you have not had. I have left very similar comments myself.
It sucks that the Internet makes us instantly distrust each other.
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data intensive
I take it you weren’t using flakes?
I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it’s data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it’s hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It’ll download all packages again even though there’s minimal change.
I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.
Interesting! Any reason for this choice instead of doing everything through nix?
I like the idea of NixOS in theory, but in practice I just don’t like the extra level of abstraction when configuring things. I like to know exactly what is happening. I also like to be able to open a man page for a program and just follow what’s written in there, which often times I can’t do on NixOS because they have their own way of doing things.
In general it just gives me a hacky and “bolted on” vibe.
What I’m more interested in is the package manager, which is use on a non NixOS distro (just “nix shell” alone is so awesome). I use flatpaks and they work well, but I vastly prefer Nix approach, it’s so well thought out and I would love if Nix (or something similar) would establish itself as the universal and distro independent package manager. But even here it’s lacking, after years and years you still can’t use OpenGL or Vulkan in graphical applications without a third party workaround which is crazy to me, how is that not a number one priority to fix?
Nix has a great potential as a replacement for flatpak actually as it is source based. You can guarantee what you are installing is based on which source code by compiling yourself.
Flatpak and the others are packaged by upstream. A developer can put malware in a package and upload it to flathub. That’s why it needs permission management, sandboxing etc to minimize the risk.
I like the sandboxing of flatpak not just because of malware but also for proprietary software. But I guess the same could be achieved with Nix + Bubblewrap.
Also the flatpak runtimes are insane to me, atleast the big platforms like “org.gnome.platform”. That thing weighs a nice 800mb and is pretty much a full linux install. And while in theory these should be share between programs, you can end up unlucky and have five massive runtimes for 5 different programs (like when i was trying some flatpak programs the other day). That’s a nice 4GB of overhead and programs STILL include their own libraries if they are missing in the runtimes…might as well go the windows approach.
Haha yeah. Flatpak is pretty much like having 2 linux systems on your machine at once. And of course it can be worse sometimes.
