NixOS Article: christitus.com/nixos-explained/ Titus Tech Talk NixOS Videos: kzfaq.info/sun/PLgVG4PNqM5SbjFzePr_YZJKafNf_ngbq3

I've been using NixOS for the past 8 months or so. It's completely changed how I manage my system. Everything has a learning curve, but once you get past it the rewards never stop flowing.

I tried nixOS back in the nightingale release. It was a lot of work. Felt like it hadn't matured yet. Great to see it again.

Migrated to NixOS some months ago due to not being able to make my old outdated NVIDIA GPU to work under Arch, but under NixOS it took 3 lines of config at I have been fine ever since. NixOS is truly amazing once you get used to it.

I use arch btw.

I've been using NixOS for a year now. It's great but the main problem for me it's the lack of documentation in some parts of the project. Btw, using flakes (which are unstable but have been unastable for quite a few years) is really a game changer. Makes everything easier to configure and to manage in your daily chores.

This is amazing! Thanks for highlighting it, I'm definitely interested in this project. Congrats on the 500K sub milestone, as well!!

I am in awe to see this magnificent distro receiving so much appreciation. Thank you very much for your contribution in making NixOS more beginner friendly. I greatly appreciate it!

Many many years ago when I was first planning my move to Linux I researched a ton of distros. Based on my criteria and what I wanted from an OS NixOS was by far the winner. However, at the time I was severely lacking in technical acumen. As a result I ended up on Mint. After years of Mint I moved to Kubuntu, then KDENeon, all were less than great experiences... Finally two years ago I moved to Nix. It's so damn good and they have made huge improvements in the areas that made it previously overly technical to many users.

This is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to create and share your knowledge. I googled nix setup documentation and clicked this video. One stop. You have everything. Awesome work!

I have wanted to run nixos as my main distro for a long time. But I've not had enough time to get my head wrapped around the setup. These videos will be awesome!!

Been using it as a daily driver for about 1 and half Years. I have found it to be shockingly stable.

"One config to rule them all" i absolutely love this kind of approach. Chris thank you for sharing your research. That's really cool ro know!

Thank you. I've been reading up on NixOS for 3 days now and started installing it this morning to try my hand at configuring it. I typically find your videos easy to follow and for the most part can replicate your outcomes from them so this is going to be a really nice resource as I'm not gonna lie NixOS confuses me just a tad.

Hi Chris ! I am so glad that you gave a look to NixOS. I was sure you would love it ! I have been using, hacking and exploring Nix/NixOS for almost two years. Would you be interested in exchanging more about it ? I would be very happy to give you more insights about things you might not have learnt yet (flakes, home-manager, packaging, development environment etc). Anyway, I wish you the best Nix-journey possible and will be following your adventure. Have fun and thank you for sharing those great videos with us :)

Nix OS has always interested my and I think it's great for deploying on a fleet of computers if you want the same configuration on every computer. It's a well done project. Also congrats on reaching 500k subs.

next up, dig into home-manager and Flakes.. that takes nix to a whole new level.

this seems fantasic, i love that you do content like this as like a more educationally focused thing - nice work

Just started down the nix rabbit hole. Got it installed in a vm on proxmox and used it to build a nix os pi image. Its about a 80 percent solution but I'm already a huge fan of this distro. Thanks for the videos on it, it has b3en a huge help for the steep learning curve it has!

I've been waiting for something like this for years (decades actually). I deliberately avoid doing any config to my linux systems and I use the easiest plain vanilla linux I can because it's a deadly rabbit hole of confusion and breakiness trying to customize a system. The NixOS one-off virtualization scheme is freaking brilliant and long overdue. THANKS FOR THIS!!!!

Going to go through all of your nix contents. I've been using it, but the most advanced thing I've done has been to set some aliases (pretty complex ones, but still nothing unique to nix) and options. Thanks, I really needed these examples and explanations.

I don't think I'd ever use NixOS as daily driver, but as a rather mass deployment "device" (per see), which would be GODLY for data centers and blade servers running similar/same things. Great video, CTT! :D

Chris, Discovered your channel a long time ago starting as an amateur hobbyist. Enrolled in college and have tried to completely immerse myself in the computer world. I even emailed you once about audio mixer configurations. I'm just about done with a bachelor's in cybersecurity and information assurance. Working on the SSCP certification exam right now, I have SEC+, A+, Net+, project management certified.. trying to crunch all of that before 30. I watch your videos even if they aren't relevant to what I'm studying because I am fascinated by everything. I want to become a tech priest, basically (joke, not literal lol). Blue-collar upbringing, etc. I have never installed a Linux distribution by myself, only in labs, and I have been too nervous/not confident in installing by myself. This video with the "$300k salary" made my ears perk up. I will have to tackle this. If you were starting again today, fresh out of school in 2023, what would you say to yourself? Thanks, -Ted.

Thanks for this video. I was wanting to configure NixOS, but didn´t have the time to figure it out. It looked like something I would love once I got it configured though. Great video explaining the basics of how to get up and running.

Wow! Thanks for your time & effort putting all this together. I’m going in!

This seems pretty awesome....I can't wait to do a deep dive using the items you provided 🙌

This is the best explanation I've seen yet, as someone that has no idea about it. Thank you!

Thank you so much Titus - I had been getting around to learning and trying it out - with many job offers for this expertise.. hard to pass up.

Thanks for covering what has been my favorite distro for many years. Hopefully more attention will bring more contributors. :)

I'm currently working on transitioning to NixOS on my laptop and hopefully soon on my main rig. Absolutely love it so far

Wow, really interesting concept. It feels like taking a dockerfile to set up a standard container but then multiplying that 10x and doing it for a whole OS!

I tried to use NixOS a few weeks ago, but wanted to use flakes and home manager to do things, having separate branches for my desktop and laptop configs which could be chosen by using a single command. I wound up getting frustrated and quit because it seemed like everyone was doing different things and finding answers to my questions was a pain.

I've been using NixOS for a few months and I love how stable it is but if you don't need supreme reproducibility I find it pretty overkill. I enjoy tinkering with it so I don't mind but I've lost count of the times I've thought "I could solve this in 10 seconds on Ubuntu" while trying to nixify a config or just get a program working the way I'd expect (NordVPN is especially brutal imo). That said the massive package list helps keep me here. I'd love to see a couple of videos about flakes and HM, I just changed my config over to them a few weeks ago and while it made some things much easier I do kinda miss the simplicity of using 1 configuration.nix for nearly everything.

Thanks Chris for you educational videos! much apreciate all your work. kind regards from Argentina

I started using Linux back in 2007 and did my share of distro hopping, yet i never heard about NixOS back then. I think it is because i didn't have a broadband internet connection and I used to buy IT magazines that included Linux CD-ROMs and DVD's. Finally I settled with Ubuntu because it worked fine on my Thinkpad and that's what I've being using since.

as usual chris, another amazing tutorial for both noob and advanced.....

Having everything in one config file is wonderful. That’s always been an issue finding where everything is in every slightly different distros

Thanks for the quick overview, this distro, seems to be everywhere now and not sure how I missed it before now. Again, thanks, and God bless

I won't install it as my host OS for now but would try to learn it in docker for sure. As someone said below, it would be really taxing to rebuild the whole system every time. This is good for a particular use case, like settings up dozens of machines with the same configuration.

bro! im installing nixos RIGHT NOW. this is amazing!

I'm an Arch user but I'm well up for giving Nix a go when the time comes. The package manager and language is really interesting to me

i configured the whole thing in like 4 days by rushing it and now i am fixing stuff! really good distro i love it and i love configuring my os with nix

Yes finally love the concepts going to install this tomorrow

I'm a Nix (shell.nix) user on macOS for Clojure development, for ~5 years by now. I did use NixOS too a couple of times on real hardware too. No more lengthy installation notes in READMEs to follow (for most software)! It's just faaaantastic! I still install my GUI apps with `brew install --cask` though.

Very cool! I'd seen this off and on but never really investigated it. Sounds fascinating.

Looks like I've got some distro-hopping to do now!

Great video. I actually started looking into getting good with Nix and see if I can get a job doing that

I'm a long time user of Gentoo. I'm in the process of converting my last Windows machine to Linux. I'm installing Arch at the moment. After seeing this and one other video about NixOS, my mind may be changing. I'll have a look at this on my spare laptop.

Will be giving this a try!

well done Chris 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Thanks for doing this, I just switched back to nix after being on tumbleweed for a while, once you understand it its actually pretty easy to use, once you have you config file sorted if you ever need to reinstall for whatever reason you can be up and running again in about 10 minutes with the exact same settings as before, the only issue I've had so far is some weird bug with a specific external ssd, if I format it it will fail and freeze my whole system, but its only this specific ssd, I can format it in other distro's just fine, and I can format other flash drives in nixos just fine too, so I don't know what's going on there, for some reason nixos just doesn't like that ssd.

Very Informative,Thanks Titus.

how did i never view any of this distro after so many year using archlinux... thx fir the discovery, it probably will become my main OS in a week or 2.

simply whoa. just the simple fact that I can export this to a git repo and rebuild by system from scratch on another machine is enough of a selling point for me. Time to spin up a VM and start tweaking.

Great video! Are you recording this on a NixOS machine? Or is this some kind of VM?

Ok. Absolutely one to try out if you are planning to become an it-professional. Not quite Arch, but before diving into some deep level OS stuff. Intermediate difficulty.

This is such a timely video

Thanks for the video, Some months ( 6 or 8 ) ago looked Nixos but in that time, for my looks outdated the distro but now, feels like has everything. With your config, can you run Steam and Retro Arch and code in C++ and C# ?

Thanks for the video. Much appreciated : )

what is the plugin/theme you are using so that your Vim editor has that nice status bar at the bottom (Normal vs Insert etc.)

I have heard about nixos b4 that it's really good for maintenance, security and configuration. Though, I would be interested to see the heights of automations that can be done in nixos which sets it apart from other distro. Also, I use Manjaro like an Arch user. I use Hyprland btw.

Looks like a nice configuration management built into the OS like Puppet or Chef. Reminds me of the 'gitlab-ctl reconfigure' command.

Thank you for reminding me that we only die once we stop learning and that it's possible to be as young as yourself for so very long.

So let me get this right. My single config file that I create that has all my desktop settings, all the software details that I have can be saved externally? So if my machine dies, get a default build up and running and import (for want of a better word) the config file- to recreate my "original" box?

Ive looked a NixOS twice. The second time I tried it, I was happily generating my system config and realized you cant install the amdgpu-pro without quite a bit of hassle. This is a showstopper for me - I realized that the problem with NixOS is there are too many configuration options for all the open source projects out there, so there will always be a game of catch up on the part of Nix developers and users. A great idea in theory, but it really needs an opinionated set of core software and to direct the users to use that software if they want it easily configured.

I spent the last few months trying to get nixOS going. My final hurdle was a proper local WordPress development install. I tried many ways, including their WP stuff. Had to drop it to get work done but I still want to get in.

when you add a package, does it resolves all the rependencies too? thanks

Awesome work, thank you.

this video alone got a follow for the excellent work

I tried using it once before and absolutely love it. I love having everything managed in a single file (if you want to), my issue came when trying to install things that are tricky to install on, let's say, pop os or arch. I keep looking for reasons to go back, I just need to know a bit more on how it works.

This was pretty much my reaction to Pop!_OS a year ago when I first tested it. Thoroughly impressed and couldn't break it throwing all the random shit I could find at it. Plus it was running on 10-year-old hardware. Nothing SUPER special in general terms, just the fact that I got it to work as well as it did and still does, on two PCs now, was good enough. Two more to upgrade from W10 :D Really didn't have to do much more than just google a ton of stuff since I'm not super fluent in Linux, I just dabble. The only thing I couldn't get to work or find instructions for, was streaming video on Discord, which I heard is now fixed for the most part by a third party.

So for the job types referenced, which is enterprise level, how does this fit into what is traditionally a RHEL world on hosted virtual hosts or public cloud? Is this replacing RHEL or complimenting it? Is this like Vagrant in being able to create the server and app setup and replicate it in situations where you are not using containers?

You're doing the lord's work up here Chris!

Hey Chris! I always enjoy your videos. I think you make awesome videos. Keep it up! I have a quick question. I noticed you had running some kind of p10k theme for zsh on your terminal. But I didn't see any setting for zsh in your configuration.nix file. Can you share how you did manage to install p10k on nixos? Thank You in advance!

How is the experience in comparison to maintaining the configuration with Ansible?

I'm seriously going to grab a notebook, and start watching all your videos . LOL

I have just moved to Nixos and I am having an hard time with some services that are not there in the repo, it is very difficult to understand what the code behind it is actually do it, the language itself is easy but many time it is not evident how expression are evaluated how they translate to the actual configuration. In my case I have a program that takes a configuration file as input and it is supposed to run in background. The program is that I don't know how to write the configuration to a file on the immutable filesystem and how to pack the command into a systemd service. Everything in NixOS seems ready to be used, but as soon as you have to do things "manually", it really takes a lot of time to research as the documentation is not really easy to grasp

Damn, thank you for all the hard work. I was just about to take the Nix plunge. Timing could not have been better :) Have a great weekend!

Dayumm i use the ntlite version, should i switch to this one ?

I wonder if NixOs will be suitable for my daily driving. I need KDE plasma desktop with sddm-git, pytorch with rocm enabled, firefox browser and flatpak. Will checkout sometime later this year or the next year when plasma 6 will be released. The hard block is the sddm-git which I prefer to run on wayland instead of the usual rooted xorg with plasma 5. Auto upgrade caught my attention the most. Arch does well with chaotic-aur repo. As you said , since there is very less documentation on this I was skeptical to switch to it since long time.

This is wild! Thanks for your interest video content.

Thank you for popularizing "the only linux". It is getting better and better.

Looks great an kinda stable. Would you recommend this for work? You've said a lot of good things about this distro, but also it would be as useful to know what problems did you have(or not) at the start and how easy or hard it might be to move to this distro

I'm curious which hedge fund offered you the position? Citadel? Not sure if they work with NixOS though.

does it have network drivers installed with it? will my dvd games work on nixOS?

I spent a whole day trying to install NixOS onto one of my SSD partitions last week via different methods but I could never figure out how to get it to boot. I even attempted manual installation via command line before giving up. I am currently using three distros on my boot SSD, and I have distro hopped about a dozen distros so far. Maybe NixOS doesn’t share a sandbox well with others? rEFInd is my boot manager. rEFInd cannot see a bootable NixOS volume following installation from the NixOS gnome live installer USB stick. Various work arounds with GRUB (which rEFInd knows about and allows me to load) did not succeed in getting NixOS to show up. Hours spent reading forums and the NixOS installation guide did not solve it. Maybe I will try installing NixOS onto a freshly formatted SSD and see if I can get a bootable computer that way, but I don’t have the time to waste another day on this project right now. I am too frustrated with the installation process versus all the other linux distros I tried and succeeded installing. PS, None of the NixOS installers work from my Ventoy flash drive. They all kernel panic early in the installer’s boot… at least on my HP Dev One laptop (Ryzen 7 with 64 gb RAM.) I currently have six other distros on my Ventoy USB stick that work perfectly well. Only NixOS panics every time.

Chris, I saw that you have packages from flatpack and nix-os on your system. So I have a question: if you need to download a package and it's available in both nix and flatpack, which one would you choose and why?

This looks wild!

Hey Chris where did you find the jobs related to NixOs

Is there some utility to verify if a nix config file is correct like in the event I want to write one before trying out nix?

are those videos good for learning linux? for a mid user?

Super cool, ty!

I've only used nix on Replit, but it was super convenient.

Ha I wish there were NixOS jobs where I lived that paid even half that 😁 It is a great platform although can be a lot of work to maintain over time on a desktop. Lovely on a server that doesn't change very often though when you want to scale the number of installs into the hundreds or thousands.

Wow thank you for sharing

How did you make your terminal look like that?

This is Amazing!

This looks really cool.

I tried popOS which ran like crap on my thinkpad w dgpu, about a week ago I figured I'd give Linux another try and installed over PopOS with Debian 12 and it's great so far! Actually moved my entire workflow over to linux

Thank you for the video.