I’ve been configuring my Framework laptop with NixOS for a few years. The original premise of a reproducible OS was really appealing, but I’ve definitely run into drawbacks. The main one is that everything seems to take forever if you’re not using Nix every day, you lose the “muscle memory”quickly.

Also, while LLMs are great for coding, they’re still not very good at writing Nix.

▲

justinrubek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think this may be far more personal than expected. One of the things I like about running NixOS on my workstations and servers is that it's mostly hands off and right where I left it. I commonly go weeks to months or more without touching it, and it's all right there, organized, and ready to go. It allows me to offload a lot of the context and there's not much to have to remember.

	▲	forgetbook 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I see both of your points here. I also have lost muscle memory on nix-rebuild-shell, and it's a technical onboarding to get that back. What I'm hoping for is a graphical installer within NixOS that abstracts it away for nontechncial users

▲

redrove 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

About LLMs not being very good at Nix, I disagree.

I went from not having written a single line of Nix to a full fledged repo with multiple mac’s, multiple NixOS hosts with impermanence, the whole lot in a couple months with remarkable speed with claude code.

Mind you I had decades of infra and dev experience behind me as well as experience with claude code and LLMs in general.

I think that in the right experienced hands they’re a great tool for becoming up to speed and productive.