For the past few months I have been using nixos as my daily driver.

Why ?

~3 months ago I was searching for an easy solution for encrypting my laptop and after reading arch wiki I new that I needed to reinstall my system. I remembered seeing chrits titus take on nixos, so I thought wy not try it?

My configuration

I installed my system mainly with this blog post. You can find my whole /etc/nixos dir at my git server

What is nix?

Nix is a language focused on creating packages for a package manager as a whole. It is a solution for packaging software (not only for linux) consistently - that docker have a problem with.

Their is a grate talk Matthew Croughan - What Nix Can Do (Docker Can't) which I highly recommend to watch.

Then why nixos?

Simply speaking it is a linux distro that uses nix as a package manager.

It has a blueprint which is an instruction how the whole system is build. What packages are in use? Are they any users (not counting root)? What are the options for your whole systems? Those questions are answered in configuration.nix file.

What I learned throw it?

I would not recommend this distro for a new comer. Many things that you learn here are to specific for only this systems and would not apply anywhere else.

If you want to use your system offline, just use debian.

Don't install build dependencies for your project in your nixos config. Use flakes instead.

It is surely grate solution for servers, but I will need to check it personally.

Final thoughts

It could become the ultimate solution that solves packing problem. Thou for now it is the greatest tool that I learned in past 2 years.