I had quite a rollercoaster going from Windows 10 to Arch to Windows and then settling on NixOS. Main reason being able to do clean package/program setup and centralize, version-control my configuration.

My main issue with Arch was that after installing and trying stuff it left OS dirty even after package removal. This might be because I had some things built and installed through AUR (e.g. latest mpv releases that sometimes broke). Eventually I went back to latest Windows 11 build wanting easy no-bs setup.

Of course, then MS decides to shove down half baked AI integration that somehow used half my RAM and randomly slowed my CPU. I am guessing it was busy indexing, searching or security-scanning something.

Got increasingly annoyed by Microslop and tried NixOS. Bumpy ride initially but after committing for few weeks I am finally settling on it be the last OS I need.

I switched my workstation over to NixOS ~6 weeks ago and it's been really good, I'm a total convert. The thing that really got me over the hump was entirely configuring it using Claude Code.

One unexpected benefit is that both my workstation and my backup laptop have the same setup, so I can run updates on the scratch box before doing my workstation. I decided to run the "latest" rather than 25.11 release, so it's nice to test before I apply (I hit a GDM issue a few weeks ago that left me at a black screen; but not a huge deal, just select the "previous" option in the grub screen).

I've got everything to parity with what I had on my previous Ubuntu workstation. I had anticipated issues with some software that isn't packaged (but NixOS packages a LOT), but that wasn't an issue. Claude was able to do all those things no problem.

The biggest tricky bit was with my vim setup; I've been using AstroVIM and trying to get away from managing my own vim setup. You can't, AFAICT, just apply astrovim in NixOS. So I described the vim setup I wanted to Claude Code, and I now have a ~700 line config that implements everything I wanted: LSP, TreeSitter, a small variety of other things. Unlike Astro/Lunar, where tweaks you want to make are buried in some set of files in this whole giant distro, it is all encoded in this one "neovim.nix" file.

I also set up home-manager and SOPS and so far that has been working just great! I now have home directory settings that are replicated across 2 machines.

I'm still really only using it on one machine, so we'll see how it gets more complicated if I start running it on some servers.

NixOS has been my daily driver since 2022/2023 and I have greatly improved the management of my 2 computers and few VMs since. Because of LLMs, I now understand the language much better, but even if I didn't want to write Nix directly, describing the config to AI usually produces good results.

The two main sticking points IMO are still:

- Development environments are still a pain. devenv.sh is great for web and backend, but not perfect for dependency (package) management and more complicated environments like mobile or embedded

- nixpkgs monorepo doesn't update fast enough IMO. As a consequence, I see a number of flake repositories popping up to more easily package and distribute software not yet on nixpkgs or that don't update often enough (https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix is a good example). This is perhaps by design, but it takes some digging to find the reliable and trustworthy flake repos. I'm increasingly concerned with AUR-like trust issues

After using NixOS for a bit and eventually learning to rely on it, life without it seems inconceivably complex

I really love NixOS for my two devices, one surface laptop (lol), and my nvidia pc. It reduced my headaches with drivers so much.

Before updating my nvidia driver or something related to my surface I was scared to break something. With NixOS I can just go back to the old working config.

Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

> Deprecation of x86_64-darwin

Understandable with Apple dropping official support but kind of sad as they were selling Intel powered Macs until as recently as 2023 and with Tahoe still continuing to receive security updates until 2028.

How is NixOS on Intel Macs currently? Hopefully Linux can still breathe life into these computers in 10 years time.

[delayed]

[delayed]

> The 26.05 release was made possible due to the efforts of 2842 contributors, who authored 59703 commits since the previous release.

Maybe they should think about increasing their release cycle, that sounds completely unmanageable.

After 10 years in my company I have around 1,500 commits in total, it would take me 390 years to author 60K.

Let's talk about the important things... how is the drama currently on the Nix community?

I decided to move to NixOS a few months ago. In terms of OS, it was one of the best decisions I've made so far. It's awesome to have the rollback experience, upgrade whenever you want and also being able to experiment without being afraid of breaking already working stuff.

Another great benefit, is that AI can read my whole OS (good and bad at the same time, I know). This makes the AI way more accurate on giving you a good solution instead of having to scan all of your OS and dig into /etc.

Personally, I really like NixOS. It's hard but definetely worth the try. Probably not for everyone, but worth it if you're a computer scientist or need to maintain hundreds of computers.