There are many distros for people who don't want to care - Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary OS, MX Linux, etc. I don't see how NixOS not being one of them is NixOS's problem.
> "I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop."
What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.
> is NixOS's problem. [...] And this is still not the distro's problem.
It seems like the author is talking to people who might consider using NixOS for desktops, not towards NixOS itself. Unless I missed something in the article, the author is not saying this is a NixOS problem, but a "I made the wrong choice for me" problem, and now they're sharing the experience of reaching that conclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I (like many) have a love-hate relationship with NixOS, where I use it for all my servers both remote and at home, but my desktop/laptops remain on Arch Linux because I too don't fit it fitting for desktop usage. But I wouldn't argue against people who want to/not want to use it for desktop use, cool that it works or not for them.
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows
I think based on the context, the author is talking about the average developer really, not the typical end-user. They do say "someone who wants to use a computer like a regular person to do regular work" which might confuse people, but they really are talking about developers, as you can tell by the rest of the article.
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.
The average person doesn't even want Windows. They want to click a button and not be bothered with the implementation details.
That is why mobile/tablet is such a popular form of compute these days. People don't even have to learn the basics of interfacing with a file system most of the time. Want to look at pictures you've taken? You can be oblivious to the fact that your camera app puts picture files in a specific directory and embeds a date code in the file name, the photo viewer app takes care of that for you.
I want the power of Nixos and not caring. I would like this experience both for the desktop and the server.
I said this one time on hacker news and a nixos fan told me that people like me should basically fuck off from the community because they don’t want people like me.
I used nixos for about a year for work so I definitely see the benefits of this but this ass hole attitude just made me sick of it. Like why can’t I have both? Is it impossible to have both? It may not exist yet but there’s a need here that would benefit everyone if it were filled.
Needless to say that thanks to that person I now really just dislike the nixos community. Rude and no flexibility in changing. Inevitably some guy might respond to this to apologize on behalf of the community and I appreciate that… but at the same time I think most members of the community truly have this attitude of keeping things hard and challenging on nixos and they don’t want things to change at all.
In addition to this.
Everything the guy mentioned that makes nixos hard for desktop can apply to servers as well. It’s not as if everything magically gets better.
NixOS has been my daily driver for gaming, code experiments and general productivity for about a year and a half now. I’ve been using desktop Linux in varying ways for 20+ years, and while there are certainly downsides/tradeoffs, I don’t see myself leaving NixOS anytime soon.
I’d been curious about it many times in the past, but found the learning curve to be prohibitive the first several times I tried it. I’m fairly convinced that many of the problems people experience stem from the poor documentation and over-enthusiastic community extolling the virtues of Flakes and Home Manager.
I understand their value and why people like using them, but for a beginner, those capabilities just layer complexity on top of something that already feels unfamiliar, and make it impossible to figure out which thing isn’t working when things go wrong. When I went to a very Vanilla NixOS configuration as a starting point, everything clicked and I was able to build up a solid desktop environment incrementally.
As a tinkerer, the killer feature for me is the ease of experimenting with packages/whole configurations and then reverting back to my known good config. Type `nix-shell -p <package>` and the package is ready for use, and totally gone when I exit the shell.
I don’t think need is the right way to describe my relationship with NixOS as a desktop. But decades of experience dealing with the aftermath of installing/experimenting/tweaking my environment in traditional distros sure makes me appreciate how much easier it can be.
> I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop.
NixOS on the desktop isn’t targeted at the average person, or probably even the average Linux desktop user. If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice. But I think that will be a very individual/personal calculation.
It has been my daily driver for coding, gaming and writing for 14 months now. I have also been using Linux since the late 1990s, and I really value the 100s of hours I've poured into NixOS to make my machines work the same between reinstalls.
I started on a work laptop, and moved the configuration to my home desktop; it instantly worked the same way. I copied the configuration to my gaming laptop, and when my desktop broke down, I could continue to use my gaming laptop as if it were the same computer.
Being able to copy-paste a few snippets and have Steam working was amazing.
> If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice.
It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.
But NixOS has a way of converting all your regular problems into Nix problems.
Here I am, trying to get back into Kubernetes.
But all I can focus on is how to install Kubernetes.
> It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.
My middle ground approach has been to use containers and fall back to a more traditional Linux approach within those containers when I don’t want to be bothered (or just don’t need) to figure out the Nix Way.
If it’s something that’s core to my daily setup, I’ll still invest the time to bake it into my NixOS config, but using fallbacks like this has been a good middle ground for me that allows me to take advantage of the best parts of NixOS without adding undue pain when spinning up experiments.
Nix is bad because the language is very limited and extremely hard to debug and the module system is fragile and obscure (just try to write a recursion-safe mkMerge and prove it won't magically drop some parts of your config because the values in the module system are always magic attrsets, not values), but, unfortunately, there is nothing better around.
Even updating once per year is still a battle. It avoids the constant breakages from using unstable, but the problem is even the mainline “stable” nixpkgs will break because there really isn’t a good integration story for all of these components. Case in point: I just spent an hour this week pointlessly updating my home manager config because home manager just decided that a breaking api change would go in. The nix people have designed the ecosystem in such a way that everyone’s bespoke configuration can break at any given point and there is not an easy way to integration test even every common scenario.
In other words, the old adage still rings true. The beauty of Nix is that you can do anything. The ugliness of nix is that you can do anything
Everything is a battle and nix battle is bit less hopeless than the imperative distro battle, but again, nix is bad but noone wants to build a better thingy.
I've seen countless attempts and I'm trying to make my own build system (not targeting linux distros though). The problem is extremely hard. Essentially you have to build a general purpose PL which is better (more introspectable/debuggable/extensible) than other GPPLs.
What's been driving me batshit is when nixos-rebuild decides it wants to build from source. I just burned an hour the other day trying to update, and getting stuck because Nix decided my little old laptop needed to compile node.js from source. Had to trial-and-error remove packages to figure out which one was transitively pulling in node.js.
It turned out to be ansible... which is a pure python tool. Beats me.
There's also some cases where it wants to build Android Studio from source. I've just removed it and now run it in a VM.
I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, and I'm sure nixos-rebuild has a reason to build things from source, and maybe I'm not RTFMing hard enough. But good god, I just need my system to update.
If you've spent time with Nix, I assume you heard about Guix at some stage. And if you've heard about Guix and still make the above comment, I assume you have some reason(s) to think the Scheme programming language doesn't solve some/all those problems you mention.
Nonetheless, in case those assumptions are off - GNU Guix exists, and is written in and extended in (Guile) Scheme. Guile is general purpose, has the excellent Andy Wingo powering a lot of improvements to the language the last years, and some people are very fond of it. Perhaps you'd be interested in investigating, if Nix's DSL wasn't to your liking.
Do you use guix? I've used nix for years now, and I really wanted to use guix instead, but I could never wrap my head around it for some reason. Once I installed nixOS, I felt like I could just kind of get rolling without the confusion. I couldn't tell you where that confusion comes from though.
However, after these last few years, I have a few gripes that I'd like to check with a guix user to see if they're represented in guix.
1) I can't easily pin a software I'm using to a specific version, it seems like everything has to be from a specific hash of nixpkgs
2) Relatedly, I can't upgrade firefox without upgrading every single piece of software installed on my computer
3) Dynamic linking doesn't work. I can get around it with steam-run, but that's hacky and I worry it won't be supported forever
> the Scheme programming language doesn't solve some/all those problems you mention
Yes, the Scheme programming language doesn't solve any those problems I mention.
> improvements to the language
Despite of the language, if we speak about Linux distros, I need all those pesky blobs to get my desktop running. And, by the way, is there anything alike to flakes, so I can have an actually reproducible build, not a mess of channels?
In fact, I'd openly recommend such a solution: NixOS base, most applications via flatpak, and dev work in distrobox. Gives you 80% of the benefits for 20% of the work.
(Although I will also happily agree that Fedora's Silverblue or OpenSUSE MicroOS as the base is also pretty good; I think that's just a trade if you need to actually tweak the base layer)
No, you don't need NixOS on the desktop, but for certain people--like me!--it sure is nice. For example, I have this preoccupation with remembering how I configured something. I'd developed note-taking systems to remember how I'd set something up for the inevitable reinstallation (say a new computer)? Now? Download a few text files from github, type a command, and 10 minutes later I'm back in business.
It was a tough road to get comfortable, though I tell people that's because NixOS should be treated like an entirely different OS rather than as a distribution. But now? It's great. It solves a real problem for me. I definitely don't think it's for everyone, but this post draws an overly general conclusion.
I landed on "immutable distros by default for average users" as well. It is a more Windows/macOS like experience where it is much harder to mess up the system.
Flatpak guarantees everything will work in most cases, and for other cases there's AppImage. Just need to get most devs to distribute AppImages. BoxBuddy with distrobox will solve _all_ edge cases where someone says "X works with Y in Z on my machine" so you replicate their machine in distrobox.
I know this is trading program size with convenience, but that's what Windows and macOS does too. It is better to be on some immutable linux distro rather than Windows in my opinion. We don't have to force the average person who just wants their computer to work to install (extreme example) Gentoo or whatever.
I used Nix for two years on basically everything, and I would sum it up as: Nix makes hard things easy, and easy things hard. This post mirrors my own experience and I no longer recommend Nix for desktop use. I agree that it makes a wonderful server in many cases.
I loved NixOS when I tried it, its value is real. But the problem as always is the cost you have to pay for that value.
In my case I was using Flutter for an app and when a new version was released the version supported by the current NixOS version was old. So I had to search for a flake that supported the new version but it was abandoned some versions ago. So finally I had to search for a how to create a flake so the latest version would work.
Cue some hours of work until I had it working.
Compare this to Ubuntu where I execute "flutter upgrade" and I have it working in a minute.
For my dev machine if I need some kind of reproducibility I have Docker at hand. It's a 100% perfect value solution for this? No, but the cost to pay is much lower than Nix.
I'm in a similar position to the author—running NixOS on a Framework 13 for about a year—and while I agree with some of their points I think I disagree with others.
> However, this means that your projects end up populated with Nix files, which is particularly annoying when you want to submit PRs to upstream projects
This is a legitimate gripe, but it does have a mitigation, which is to add those files to your global gitignore. The trade-off you make here is that you have to explicitly add the files to repos that actually do need them, but that's a one and done cost.
> I'm now responsible for configuring this entire system. I am also responsible for updating this system.
On the contrary, I have felt much less responsible for configuring and updating my whole system since switching to NixOS. Most of my system is just whatever the upstream channels are doing. My whole system config is maybe 300 lines long, and most of that is a list of the programs I want installed, which is something that I've always wished I could have on other distros but can't.
On other distros I have felt much more responsible for controlling my whole system because random crap would break all the time and I had to learn how it was configured. That has never happened to me on NixOS.
Also, containers are totally available on NixOS and I use them all the time. I've avoided flatpak so far not because it's not available but because I want to try to do things the NixOS way and I haven't felt the need to move away from fully declarative.
None of which is to say that NixOS is right for you or anyone in particular, but so far my experience has been that there is a very steep initial learning curve that you do get over. Maybe someday I'll give Fedora Bluefin a shot, but in the meantime I'm definitely not regretting leaving behind the traditional distro model.
Not arguing for Nix here, but couldn’t you use Distrobox on Nix to mitigate some of the author’s problems while still getting benefits from Nix for the basic install?
Note: I’m not a Nix user - primarily Fedora and Debian, though I’ve used Bluefin a lot and used to use PopOS as a gaming desktop. (Rarely have any time for gaming these days…)
As a regular user of NixOS and distrobox: Yes, you absolutely can combine them. I actually ended up using distrobox a lot less than planned (native NixOS ended up being friendlier than expected), but it does work.
Seconded. I have been using nixos for a few years. I don't use it for everything, but I like it for dev. It was weird at first, and there were one or two early blocking problems I had to solve before I could do work. Like how do I set gpg pin-entry, but I forget stuff like that and have to search for it on any platform. At least on nixos is all written down somewhere even if I'm too lazy to take notes.
The installer is super easy to use; full disk encryption is baked in if you want it, the default desktop is fine, and the overwhelming majority of my config is just the apps I want installed by default.
I love this because it makes my desktop or laptop totally commodified: if I break my laptop I can get another one out of the closet and:
-- install nixos in 10 minutes
-- copy a couple of stanzas out of my nix config file into the new system one
-- untar a backup /home/user
-- `nix rebuild switch`
-- drink a beer
No installing a bunch of dev environment stuff. No greping internet for 'gpg pin-entry' or 'how to install docker' because I had to write that into a config in the first place. Basically I like nixos because I'm a lazy fucker and it makes me front end load the work so I only have to do it once.
Also, these days if I have trouble writing a nix thing I can usually just vibecode my way out of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Readit News
There are many distros for people who don't want to care - Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary OS, MX Linux, etc. I don't see how NixOS not being one of them is NixOS's problem.
> "I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop."
What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.
It seems like the author is talking to people who might consider using NixOS for desktops, not towards NixOS itself. Unless I missed something in the article, the author is not saying this is a NixOS problem, but a "I made the wrong choice for me" problem, and now they're sharing the experience of reaching that conclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I (like many) have a love-hate relationship with NixOS, where I use it for all my servers both remote and at home, but my desktop/laptops remain on Arch Linux because I too don't fit it fitting for desktop usage. But I wouldn't argue against people who want to/not want to use it for desktop use, cool that it works or not for them.
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows
I think based on the context, the author is talking about the average developer really, not the typical end-user. They do say "someone who wants to use a computer like a regular person to do regular work" which might confuse people, but they really are talking about developers, as you can tell by the rest of the article.
Average developer wants Windows (with WSL) or Mac. Still not Linux. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The average person doesn't even want Windows. They want to click a button and not be bothered with the implementation details.
That is why mobile/tablet is such a popular form of compute these days. People don't even have to learn the basics of interfacing with a file system most of the time. Want to look at pictures you've taken? You can be oblivious to the fact that your camera app puts picture files in a specific directory and embeds a date code in the file name, the photo viewer app takes care of that for you.
I said this one time on hacker news and a nixos fan told me that people like me should basically fuck off from the community because they don’t want people like me.
I used nixos for about a year for work so I definitely see the benefits of this but this ass hole attitude just made me sick of it. Like why can’t I have both? Is it impossible to have both? It may not exist yet but there’s a need here that would benefit everyone if it were filled.
Needless to say that thanks to that person I now really just dislike the nixos community. Rude and no flexibility in changing. Inevitably some guy might respond to this to apologize on behalf of the community and I appreciate that… but at the same time I think most members of the community truly have this attitude of keeping things hard and challenging on nixos and they don’t want things to change at all.
In addition to this.
Everything the guy mentioned that makes nixos hard for desktop can apply to servers as well. It’s not as if everything magically gets better.
If you want to use it as your desktop, nobody’s stopping you. They’re making the case why they think it’s unsuitable.
* less service interruptions by using chromeOS over a cell carriers network instead of a failing internal network
* improved productivity from fewer OS configuration and update problems by switching to Macs
* Lower costs across the board due to better or less expensive hardware with Chrome and Mac
* Higher dev productivity in a small dev shop by requiring devs to use the exact same os they deploy code to (it forced the devs to learn)
I’d been curious about it many times in the past, but found the learning curve to be prohibitive the first several times I tried it. I’m fairly convinced that many of the problems people experience stem from the poor documentation and over-enthusiastic community extolling the virtues of Flakes and Home Manager.
I understand their value and why people like using them, but for a beginner, those capabilities just layer complexity on top of something that already feels unfamiliar, and make it impossible to figure out which thing isn’t working when things go wrong. When I went to a very Vanilla NixOS configuration as a starting point, everything clicked and I was able to build up a solid desktop environment incrementally.
As a tinkerer, the killer feature for me is the ease of experimenting with packages/whole configurations and then reverting back to my known good config. Type `nix-shell -p <package>` and the package is ready for use, and totally gone when I exit the shell.
I don’t think need is the right way to describe my relationship with NixOS as a desktop. But decades of experience dealing with the aftermath of installing/experimenting/tweaking my environment in traditional distros sure makes me appreciate how much easier it can be.
> I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop.
NixOS on the desktop isn’t targeted at the average person, or probably even the average Linux desktop user. If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice. But I think that will be a very individual/personal calculation.
I started on a work laptop, and moved the configuration to my home desktop; it instantly worked the same way. I copied the configuration to my gaming laptop, and when my desktop broke down, I could continue to use my gaming laptop as if it were the same computer.
Being able to copy-paste a few snippets and have Steam working was amazing.
> If it’s causing more pain than it’s solving, it’s probably not the right choice.
It certainly is causing more pain than it's solving.
But NixOS has a way of converting all your regular problems into Nix problems.
Here I am, trying to get back into Kubernetes.
But all I can focus on is how to install Kubernetes.
My middle ground approach has been to use containers and fall back to a more traditional Linux approach within those containers when I don’t want to be bothered (or just don’t need) to figure out the Nix Way.
If it’s something that’s core to my daily setup, I’ll still invest the time to bake it into my NixOS config, but using fallbacks like this has been a good middle ground for me that allows me to take advantage of the best parts of NixOS without adding undue pain when spinning up experiments.
Update once per year.
> brew, distrobox, flatpak
You can have that stuff on Nix if you need it.
Nix is bad because the language is very limited and extremely hard to debug and the module system is fragile and obscure (just try to write a recursion-safe mkMerge and prove it won't magically drop some parts of your config because the values in the module system are always magic attrsets, not values), but, unfortunately, there is nothing better around.
In other words, the old adage still rings true. The beauty of Nix is that you can do anything. The ugliness of nix is that you can do anything
Everything is a battle and nix battle is bit less hopeless than the imperative distro battle, but again, nix is bad but noone wants to build a better thingy.
I've seen countless attempts and I'm trying to make my own build system (not targeting linux distros though). The problem is extremely hard. Essentially you have to build a general purpose PL which is better (more introspectable/debuggable/extensible) than other GPPLs.
It turned out to be ansible... which is a pure python tool. Beats me.
There's also some cases where it wants to build Android Studio from source. I've just removed it and now run it in a VM.
I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, and I'm sure nixos-rebuild has a reason to build things from source, and maybe I'm not RTFMing hard enough. But good god, I just need my system to update.
Nonetheless, in case those assumptions are off - GNU Guix exists, and is written in and extended in (Guile) Scheme. Guile is general purpose, has the excellent Andy Wingo powering a lot of improvements to the language the last years, and some people are very fond of it. Perhaps you'd be interested in investigating, if Nix's DSL wasn't to your liking.
However, after these last few years, I have a few gripes that I'd like to check with a guix user to see if they're represented in guix.
1) I can't easily pin a software I'm using to a specific version, it seems like everything has to be from a specific hash of nixpkgs
2) Relatedly, I can't upgrade firefox without upgrading every single piece of software installed on my computer
3) Dynamic linking doesn't work. I can get around it with steam-run, but that's hacky and I worry it won't be supported forever
Yes, the Scheme programming language doesn't solve any those problems I mention.
> improvements to the language
Despite of the language, if we speak about Linux distros, I need all those pesky blobs to get my desktop running. And, by the way, is there anything alike to flakes, so I can have an actually reproducible build, not a mess of channels?
> You can have that stuff on Nix if you need it.
In fact, I'd openly recommend such a solution: NixOS base, most applications via flatpak, and dev work in distrobox. Gives you 80% of the benefits for 20% of the work.
(Although I will also happily agree that Fedora's Silverblue or OpenSUSE MicroOS as the base is also pretty good; I think that's just a trade if you need to actually tweak the base layer)
No, you don't need NixOS on the desktop, but for certain people--like me!--it sure is nice. For example, I have this preoccupation with remembering how I configured something. I'd developed note-taking systems to remember how I'd set something up for the inevitable reinstallation (say a new computer)? Now? Download a few text files from github, type a command, and 10 minutes later I'm back in business.
It was a tough road to get comfortable, though I tell people that's because NixOS should be treated like an entirely different OS rather than as a distribution. But now? It's great. It solves a real problem for me. I definitely don't think it's for everyone, but this post draws an overly general conclusion.
Flatpak guarantees everything will work in most cases, and for other cases there's AppImage. Just need to get most devs to distribute AppImages. BoxBuddy with distrobox will solve _all_ edge cases where someone says "X works with Y in Z on my machine" so you replicate their machine in distrobox.
I know this is trading program size with convenience, but that's what Windows and macOS does too. It is better to be on some immutable linux distro rather than Windows in my opinion. We don't have to force the average person who just wants their computer to work to install (extreme example) Gentoo or whatever.
In my case I was using Flutter for an app and when a new version was released the version supported by the current NixOS version was old. So I had to search for a flake that supported the new version but it was abandoned some versions ago. So finally I had to search for a how to create a flake so the latest version would work.
Cue some hours of work until I had it working.
Compare this to Ubuntu where I execute "flutter upgrade" and I have it working in a minute.
For my dev machine if I need some kind of reproducibility I have Docker at hand. It's a 100% perfect value solution for this? No, but the cost to pay is much lower than Nix.
> However, this means that your projects end up populated with Nix files, which is particularly annoying when you want to submit PRs to upstream projects
This is a legitimate gripe, but it does have a mitigation, which is to add those files to your global gitignore. The trade-off you make here is that you have to explicitly add the files to repos that actually do need them, but that's a one and done cost.
> I'm now responsible for configuring this entire system. I am also responsible for updating this system.
On the contrary, I have felt much less responsible for configuring and updating my whole system since switching to NixOS. Most of my system is just whatever the upstream channels are doing. My whole system config is maybe 300 lines long, and most of that is a list of the programs I want installed, which is something that I've always wished I could have on other distros but can't.
On other distros I have felt much more responsible for controlling my whole system because random crap would break all the time and I had to learn how it was configured. That has never happened to me on NixOS.
Also, containers are totally available on NixOS and I use them all the time. I've avoided flatpak so far not because it's not available but because I want to try to do things the NixOS way and I haven't felt the need to move away from fully declarative.
None of which is to say that NixOS is right for you or anyone in particular, but so far my experience has been that there is a very steep initial learning curve that you do get over. Maybe someday I'll give Fedora Bluefin a shot, but in the meantime I'm definitely not regretting leaving behind the traditional distro model.
Note: I’m not a Nix user - primarily Fedora and Debian, though I’ve used Bluefin a lot and used to use PopOS as a gaming desktop. (Rarely have any time for gaming these days…)
The installer is super easy to use; full disk encryption is baked in if you want it, the default desktop is fine, and the overwhelming majority of my config is just the apps I want installed by default.
I love this because it makes my desktop or laptop totally commodified: if I break my laptop I can get another one out of the closet and:
-- install nixos in 10 minutes
-- copy a couple of stanzas out of my nix config file into the new system one
-- untar a backup /home/user
-- `nix rebuild switch`
-- drink a beer
No installing a bunch of dev environment stuff. No greping internet for 'gpg pin-entry' or 'how to install docker' because I had to write that into a config in the first place. Basically I like nixos because I'm a lazy fucker and it makes me front end load the work so I only have to do it once.
Also, these days if I have trouble writing a nix thing I can usually just vibecode my way out of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯