NixOS

Reader supplied reviews for NixOS Average rating 9.1 from 97 review(s) What are your thoughts on NixOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- unstable25.0524.1124.0523.1123.0522.1122.0521.1121.0520.0920.0319.0919.0318.0917.0916.0916.0315.09.101214.12.88514.04.63013.10.35728 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 25.05 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-12 Votes: 1 I use NixOs on my main personal machine, two servers and a few other devices around the house because I can have a central configuration that is published on a git server and allows easy, repeatable and recoverable deployments. The peace of mind it gives, that when a SD card from a rpi dies, a new one, with the exact same state, is created in seconds, really is it's main selling point for me. Learning the Nix language (that is powering it's configuration) is relativly easy once you get the hang of it. Nix flakes provide ultimate flexibility without adding much complexity. The stable releases are really stable, I haven't had any isses so far with crashes, bluescreens or unfixable errors. Only downside is, using binary released software can be a bit of a hurdle and cross compiling software for other OS's requires you to also jump a few hoops, but nothing too hard. I'd say if you're looking for a reliable and most importantly clear configured system, NixOS is your choice! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-01 Votes: 2 Finally I can use latest packages without relying on Flatpaks and not worrying about my os breaking or running into dependency hell. If something breaks I just rollback to last working snapshot and go along with my day. No more overnight fixing and reinstallations. NixOS is such a amazing and unique distro. It really changed the way I use computers. The learning experience could be painful tho and documentation is still so so. However things are getting better. Hopefully it gets more traction and we get more users who contribute upstream. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 25.05 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-27 Votes: 22 Being able to use the most bleeding edge packages (even git packages) on a in-theory the most stable distro to exist is the biggest selling point of NixOS for me. I used to hate Linux before it. I always thought how Linux can't do such simple thing that Windows and Mac figured out decades ago. You are always forced to pick one side, either stable distro that is usually behind 6 months or rolling release distro that has high likelihood of breaking. After trying out dozens of distro I settled on Arch with a btrfs auto snapshots setup but yet was never satisfied. NixOS finally felt like home. Filesystem based snapshots are good but can't compete with config based rollbacks. Not to mention you can push your config on something like GitHub and always pull it and replicate your system as-is even if your entire drive fails (Which is the worst case scenario) Another great thing about NixOS is that there's no "partially updated" or "badly configured" system mess that happens in other systems. NixOS has pre-defined ways of doing things. In generic distro you can mess things up while doing them manually. In NixOS there's no "bad" way of doing things. You can enable the needed options in your config and things will work how they're supposed to be. If you add something that's not supported in config, you'll get a error beforehand. In NixOS, the updates either goes through or fail completely. These two are the main reasons why NixOS is arguably the most stable distro, even more stable than other atomic distro. Even if something does break you can just rollback and go along with your day until the problem is fixed upstream. This is a game changer for people with jobs who want a reliable system. It doesn't stop here. There's no dependency hell, nix shell allows testing packages temporarily + make custom environments and so much more Not everything is perfect. The initial learning curve is definitely high and documentation is incomplete however things are improving. Beginner friendly resources are popping every once in a while (Such as NixOS & Flakes Book) and documentation is slowly improving as the community is growing. They recently started adding useful sections from Archwiki to NixOS Wiki, which isn't a bad thing since we're taking from the best. Once you get the hang of it, there's no going back. I'd like to thank everyone involved in NixOS and NixOS community for this gift. Best regards. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 97 reader reviews of NixOS...