I use the Nix package manager as a replacement for the AUR on any distro that doesn't use the AUR. It's great. I'm interested in trying out NixOS some time - not because it's trendy, but because it solves some real problems that you'd have to solve yourself otherwise. I'm not sure test-driving it for a short while really drives home the advantages: IMO Nix will shine when you actually have a failed update and need to roll it back or when you do need to install a fresh system. Also even if you don't have to manage a fleet of PCs, the declarative approach seems great to me to copy other people's homework, just like you'd do with other dotfiles. For example I can't be bothered trying to get hyprland to work with a Nvidia GPU - but if I could just copy someone's nix config who did get it to work, I feel like that's a more manageable task.

What Josh is saying is a big part of why I use nix at work. I have a main workstation, which I do most of my work from, but because I'm often testing things in the field or when I'm working from home, it is extremely useful to have the same developer setup on all machines. Sure, you can get a lot of the same features by using more traditional dotfile-management systems or what have you, or even by using nix on another OS, but to me the fact that nix was essentially developed for ensuring that you have a declarative and robust way to get the same results, that just made the most sense to use for config management. Furthermore, NixOS was developed to use nix, so because I use nix in many of the projects I work on to ensure reproducibility, this was also an argument for using NixOS itself.

With NixOS I could install the latest nvidia drivers! I tried so many distros before this and I was stuck with older versions of the drivers. And then I discover the power of Nix :) Flakes (I can tel you this is the future because it is the response for several problems of Nix architecture), home manger, nix shells, etc. I have 5 pcs with NixOS now. Nix just killed my distro hopping !

I'm not a programmer and what really pulled and kept me sticking to NixOS is that it's so much harder to mess up my system. With other distros I've always had the problem that I'm curious to try out things and change configurations and I inevitably end up screwing something up that I don't know how to fix and I either have to start over or just give up. Even with something like Debian just trying out a package could land me in dependency hell where apt decides it needs to do certain operations I don't understand and suddenly my wifi is no longer connecting or my desktop manager is gone. NixOS has given me a very strong sense of being able to fuck around and find out without losing all my progress that I've made towards my perfect setup, because it doesn't matter that packages have diferent dependencies and also it's extremely easy to roll back a thing I tried out.

"The only way to break NixOS is corrupting the filesystem." Lol. And here I was spending most of this evening debugging a corrupted file system. :P Between prior generations (on a different partition) and a rescue version (declared through its own file that was largely copied from the internet), I'm now watching this video on that same NixOS system as though the corruption never happened. (I legitimately couldn't find anything that was actually lost in the process.)

I enjoy listening to the conversation you guys have while working. Loving your content as always pal!

Matt @37:32, Nix just solved the problem of dependencies ! That is the HEART of Nix :)

My first impactful impression of NixOS, after putting it on a laptop and going through some basic setup to actually be useful... being able to roll back your software is great. But it's weird that home or dotfiles don't seem to be part of the revisions by default. This way it supports fire-and-forget distributed system deployments much better than desktops which are continually exposed to monkeys with a wrench (i.e. me)

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2 things to add about nixOS 1. nixOS is the perfect OS for software devs, difficult for anyone else: It provides a stable distro that still allows cutting edge software. This gives me a perfectly consistent development environment. Nix is also a great tool for writing configs. 25:31 (started writing before watching that segment) - You guys really touched on all the points I wanted to say about it being perfect for devs 2. The lack of documentation isn't a problem (In the long term): NixOS difficulty level is doing the same thing arch was. Difference is, arch was popular because it was hard, nixOS is popular cause it has allot of features software devs want. If nixOS becomes easy to use, people will still be talking about it. 100% of the people who gravitate to nixOS are the sort of people who can contribute o nixOS, which means as it gains popularity, it'll improve faster than most distros. That is why the documentation problem will stop being an issue much faster than it was for arch. More people using NixOS, means more people cleaning the documentation & making tutorials, means the documentation will stop being a problem in the mid term.

I wouldn't necessarily call it overrated. People are fascinated by it because it does things in a unique way. At the same time, most people don't need the complete reproducibility that NixOS offers. Usually, fixable and stable are good enough. Complete reproducibility is overkill for most people.

Immutable distro = the devs can break it, but you can't fix it. Absolutely crazy concept I will never understand.

19:39 Steve: Whaaat valve is consider using nix??? Where did you get this information from..tell me more?

34:18 This is the primary reason. I got tired of setting up Arch over and over again

After 3 years of running dwm on top of Void Linux with zero issue, no breakage, no bug and no headache, I found myself immune to distro hopping.. Then suddenly Wayland became a thing and Hyprland became a thing even bigger.. As a Void user I had two options to get Hyprland installed on my machine whitch was either build it from source or use a third party script to get it installed via xbps-src whitch felt like aur (by the way).. As a former Arch user that hated third party stuff mixing up with my oficial packages causing bugs and crashes I definetly didin't want to go that relm ever again, so what other options did I have? Well.. trying out any of those distros that supported it natively. So I tried NixOS and ended up liking it a lot and adopting it as my main distro. Long story shot, Hyprland made me switch

Anyone know how to get the emulator working in Android studio in NixOS?

Oh it's reuploaded without the 13 minute intro! :D I think KZfaq also lets you cut videos without reuploading them.

NixOS users, like most linux users, will never reproduce.

I had fedora remove the wifi driver from mt system with an update, I downloaded the package from intel themselves and ran it. intel wifi sucks so bad

Can you expand on Josh's point of NixOS not being Linux Filesystem compliant and that breaking enterprise software?

Good stuff, fellas!

Matt would appreciate a future video where you share your thoughts on AI and the future of Linux. Tools such as GPT-4, Perplexity, GitHub Copilot, Elicit, and Scite are increasingly becoming essential in the tech and academic landscapes. Notably, OpenAI has formed a partnership with Microsoft. If these tools were developed to run exclusively on Microsoft platforms, I would have no choice but to switch back.

For me I am slowly trying to figure out nixOS as currently I manually deploy VMs harden them and configure them all as well as daily driving. it can be complex to learn but so far it seems to be pretty easy to follow but when you fail it really blows up in your face lol. What I like about it in theory that I have not completed it yet. Deploying a static setup for all my machines or virtual machines, deploy vm for security testing and CTF labs, building CLI tools in python/golang etc and being able to keep all those changes isolated from the main system and environments like venv but for everything. End goal is being able to remotely nuke a device when it is not working properly and know it is now setup with just the bare minimum needed software.

I like NixOS because it's so easy to use compared to other distros.

I really enjoyed this Nix OS discussion, but have any in the group researched "Penguins-eggs" ? Most of the PCs I manage need to have an identical built up base, where the end user can place just a few unique applications on it. Having to go into a distribution to pull up a Snapshot or move a Client Configuration to an additional new install is fine, but having on-the-shelf loaded USBs or using PXE for remote systems seems the simplest and most manageable.

This is just my take but I prefer LFS as my dev environment because I simply know my system inside and out, and also that it pushed me to install a bunch of libraries which were necessary to compile applications I use, so when building my code I make, I just don't have to install anything, everything just happens to be on my system, like for my game engine, I already had GLFW, GLEW, and libepoxy. That being said LFS is a big waste of time for most people but I like the fact that I'm not mildly inconvenienced when I want to do something because I already have covered most requirements for most software and even my own.

Arch always had a installer it was in 2012 that they had "the arch way" when systemd got put into the system and sysvinit was taken out.. they had no choice to take the old installer out as the base system have change so to keep it going they had hte manual way of things which i find it weird to see people cause most dont even remember the canadian version of arch and i been using it since 2006 as arch was always easy to isntall.... but it was much like freebsd where it just installs the base and you have to setup the gui in the commandline.. which is i like actually.... but the new archinstall script is nice and making it easier to install is keep the original roots of arch as really it was meant obe keep it simple stupid u know.

Heyyy Matt do a challenge using pen tablet as a mouse if possible, sounds fun :)

#!/bin/bash echo "It's not working" One of the compatibility reasons I had to switch back to Fedora.

My opinion about NixOS as someone who loves NixOS: Most of the benefits it provides aren't necessary for the vast majority of end users, and so these benefits are outweighted by the annoyances of having to manage it in a roundabout way when compared to the rest of the distros. Sure, there will be a dude coming here and saying "Well, I have 5 different development machines and 3 laptops that I use daily and I love that I can easily reproduce my work environment in all of them", but, again, this is not the case of 99,9% of the user base.

I'm not a big fan of nixos or nix, but I'm a bit confused. NixOS is amazing for people who know how to use it. Its not _just_ "the current flex".. Its very similar to lisp. Call me crazy, but idrt they give a damn how easy it is for unixporn script kiddies to rice nixos lol.. Not every distro owes us a simple and easy configuration process. NixOS isn't XeroLinux.. Nix is a language and OS for developers. Ubuntu is an OS for "normies". 2 ends of the spectrum..

i expected these guys to know more lol😂

I use nixos btw

I like it. Nuggies of the week☺

I don't know what made you 4 have opinions like this but I would like to know how long you used NixOS to have this kind of opinion? Were you even interested in it? Did you force yourself to use it? If the answer to the last 2 questions was "yes" then you have yourself a problem, you will not be able to give a fair opinion on anything that way and assuming that this is the case you wouldn't have spent a lot of time with it, trying to understand it rather than telling it "but I want to do it this way!!!!!"... And no, I'm not "invalidating your opinion" or something dumb like that, It's just that everything on this channel said about NixOS sounds like nobody even bothered to use it and try to get used to it more than 2 days bruh... Also, I remember in his previous videos Matt literally says "I don't even want to give NixOS users the chance to feel the pleasure of being mentioned" just because people keep recommending it to him which is a completely dumb reason to hate an entire operating system that is only made to make things easier for people that use it, it's not some offensive statement about a minority group or something... it isn't like other distros where you have to inconvenience yourself down to the depths of hell just to have a functional system (Gentoo, Mint, Arch)...

I highly doubt that "belonging" is a reason for many people. Reproducibility is the killer feature. Going through the hassle of setting a system up only once is the pure honeypot.

Josh would pass as a younger brother of one of my friends... They both look alike.

What the hell is NixOS?

.. i agree.. nix documentation is complete garbage.

Oof my "shit community alarm" is sounding

Matt, please google what the phrase "Procrustean Bed" means. Because that's exactly what you're doing. You measure all distributions by one yardstick that is only interesting to you and your friends. By the way, who are those strange people around you? Have they managed to install Ubuntu in a dual boot with Windows 11 yet? It's no big deal Matt. You'll grow up and start liking Gentoo and NixOS)))))