I've been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn't see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.
So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I'm still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.
It's clear that I'm missing something so please help me understand what it is.
Edit: Thank you to everyone in this great community! It's always so nice to have a constructive and sane discussion.
After reading so many comments, they all confirm what I've read before and I may realize that my real problem is already having a stable system and no need for the great NixOS options that are very neat but would not benefit my specific and simplistic needs.
That being said I can't refrain myself from being curious and will continue testing NixOS.
The need for only 2 config files is the top of the iceberg but hiding more complex configuration to rely on. Not that I really have too much spare time but I do enjoy learning and tweaking NixOS. With its current development state, things are changing a lot so it can keep me busy for months. That's probably what I was mostly looking for: another toy to play with.
Along my journey I will learn a lot about NixOS and may find a feature that will motivate my switch to it. Thanks again for all your precious feedback!
I'll also take this opportunity to share the best help I've found so far to start with NixOS: https://github.com/MatthiasBenaets/nixos-config And his 3 hours (!) video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y
Because your Nix config also configures your software, not just installs it. Admittedly, with base NixOS that's more true with server software than desktop. But with the addition of home manager you can also configure many desktop apps in your Nix config.
Thank you for this addition. I very much appreciate the fediverse community who is helping people to understand things, share their knowledge, and acting nicely (if we exclude some rare people who are clearly not used to live within a sane community). I've seen home manager but this raised one more question to me: what's the added value compared to stow for example? Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
I've never used stow so I can't speak to it specifically. Home manager is nice for two reasons. If you're already using NixOS you can have one unified config for your whole system. And because Nix is a programming language generation these configs, you may be able to do thing you wouldn't otherwise. It also has some nice defaults that you may not get without.
Due to the still early development of NixOS, Home manager is in some ways very similar to nix-env and flakes is still highly experimental. Also, the configuration parameters are changing quite significantly with the distro development. I'm sure this will all settle down when the distro will become more mature but to be honest that's also what attracts me. I like chaos ^^ Seriously, this shows me some potential for great achievements. I will continue testing NixOS but for now I didn't find THE reason to leave Arch yet. If I would have to deploy my config on several machines or create dedicated config using a common base then I would have been convinced. Will see where my journey leads me.
Sure but not everything can be defined in the Nix config. Firewalls have an issue, some options for packages are not implemented yet. For example systemd networkd doesn't have all the features implemented.
NixOS in it's current form does have it's limitations but it's ever improving. I personally have never had issues doing what I needed to firewall wise, but I've not done much of anything complex. Mostly just opening ports and a little port redirecting.