Thenonymous Rexius

Oh boy my two cents time!

I love the concept of NixOS. A fully declarative , reproduceable system from a single config repo! Sounds theoretically like it would be my kind of thing.

Sure, theoretically, I could have a fully reproduceable system. The time spent declaring that fully reproduceable system though… I remember the first time I was trying to get my usual disk setup of, a luks encrypted btrfs partition with multi-factor enabled decryption/authentication.

On a normal install it would take like a day at worse to install your distro. My first attempt with NixOS took me almost 4 days of screwing around in configs. 2 of those days were probably cumulatively spent waiting for the config option list of the nixos manual to search for text. And the number of redundant config options which all do the same thing! Or, are supposed to all do the same thing but in actuality, only one of them does the thing they are supposed to.

I really want to love NixOS but it always ends up feeling like an exercise in my patience and time to do even the simplest of things. As such I find myself asking the question of, am I going to spend so much time reinstalling my distro that it’s ever worth this initial investment?

Anyways, rant over. I actually have been debating switching back over for another try again myself I just have some very frustrating memories of my first attempts with the distro.

Yeah this is a repost from reddit. I remember seeing this sometime the beginning of the year I think.