I started using NixOS a month ago.

Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.

A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.

LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.

If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.

Yeah the NixOS recommendation here is clearly a joke and I wouldn't recommend it to almost anyone, but I too switched about a month ago, and it's basically made for LLMs. Let them read the Git repo and they'll actually have a chance at figuring out the issues you have.

But: you will have issues.