What does Jow Forums think of this special snowflake?

Better than Gentoo

nixos has a huge learning curve similar to learning linux all over again, and it doesn't help that the manuals are completely inapproachable and somewhat incomplete like mentions which means to get into it you need to do a lot of trial and error/spending time on the irc channel/looking up peoples nix configurations on github/getting really experienced with the full ecosystem/etc, you can't just easily transfer your skills from other distros to nixos because it's so dissimilar
nixos also offers a lot of stuff that is really nice for servers/workstations like 100% reproducible builds/deployment stuff/etc that just doesn't really work well on the desktop, although being able to define your full os setup declaratively for your hardware and have that version controlled is a very nice selling point if you find yourself wanting to clean install often (also works nicely for laptops)
nix as a package manager has some issues on other distros which should be expected but for the most part it just werks, it also has some really nice functionality for just about everybody from being able to drop you into a clean shell with a custom set of packages to being able to easily override package configurations allowing you to set build flags trivially or easily update certain software if it hasn't hit the repos yet, my only complaint is that just about every action is very slow and either tells you nothing about progress or is incredibly verbose (the former of which can be solved with some third party caching stuff)

overall both are very good if you want the niches that they fill but they're not without their drawbacks, I'd recommend trying nix out at the very least

More like "nigs" because it doesn't work and steals your disk space.

> (OP)
>It's a very good distro though it's without a doubt the strangest one I ever used and I just cannot get used to it currently. what weirded me out the most about it is that I can't launch binaries natively and I have to use the steam-run command to run them and that barely works half the time. I'm sure there is a logical reason for that but that just killed it for me
What is steam-run?
Valve's steam? I wouldn't use nixos for games, that would be a lot of work with no benefit

they explain it here nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam

they only mention it being good for games but I had some success using it on other applications

The learning curve isn't that bad if you're very experienced with Linux and functional programming. I picked it up very quickly. Unfortunately the manuals are terrible. The main nix documentation is okay but very incomplete. The rest of the docs are basically blog posts and some of them are inaccurate because of changes.
Nix is good if it solves a problem you need solved. For me, I had to write scripts to configure Gentoo, with nix I just write the configuration and everything is setup based on that.

Can you actually make a real argument about using a DSL versus a general purpose programming language or are you just a gnu/shill?

The reason you need that, by the way, is that on NixOs there are no global shared libraries. All packages must explicitly link to specific libraries and then they are only allowed to access those. This is a fundamental aspect of NixOs. It solves a lot of problems, but it means that any executable you run must be installed thru nix or have all it's code compiled in, it can't link to any libraries. Usually on Linux applications use shared libraries that are in /lib or /usr/lib. On nix, every application has it's own lib dir.

that makes sense. thanks user

I'd agree it's not that huge of a learning curve if you can work around the incompleteness of the docs, you can certainly get a working nixos install and get 80-90% of the complete experience if you're half way competent at other distros but at least in my experience it felt like it was more work than it need

they're probably shills but DSLs turn a lot of people off, even if in nixos's case it takes 0 effort to learn

Tried it, I prefer CloverOS

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not even a poorfag but I can't see myself buying a new macbook pro until they drop the butterfly keyboard

I agree.

Even one of the mason guys behind NixOS said that the benefits of DSLs vs general purpose programming languages isn't an area that's been heavily researched.

best OS

I’ve asked this a thousand times, but: do NixOS or GuixSD offer anything like Gentoo’s flags? I don’t have a lot of ram to spare on my 32bit daily driver. it’s also kind of just an autism thing now.

>nixos has a huge learning curve similar to learning linux all over again

wut?
>create one whole file
>nixos-install

>What does Jow Forums think of this special snowflake?
Uses systemd which makes it useless for me.
Has old packages (TexLive).
Interesting in theory.

Trying to figure out how it all works I feel like a total hopeless brainlet wojak, and I work with GNU/Linux professionally.
Look at this shit:
nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-gc-roots
Just look at this.
That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind.
I can't quite tell which.

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>it’s also kind of just an autism thing now
no it isn't, use flags are that fucking good. I wish every distro had the abillity to remove unnecessary bloat from a package. the closest thing use flags I can think of are snaps now that they allow you to remove certain things from a package

I'm wrong. they're just permissions for the package but still pretty similar to use flags

NixOS is based and redpilled
saved

Use it daily on my home server that deals with almost everything I need.
Virtualization of different OS, print server, private cloud, media centre... You name it.

Thinking of installing it to my laptop.
Really good shit after all those Debians, CentOS and OpenSuSe's.

It's somewhat confusing in the beginning but it's not that hard to understand if you ever programmed even basics.
But yeah I would prefer a distro like GuixSD with scheme, without that idiotic muh freedumb situation.

You can run it with non-free, I know but I would prefer something more integrated

>and I just cannot get used to it currently.
I had the same problem, it's just too weird to commit to as my main OS.