NixOS

Reader supplied reviews for NixOS Average rating 9.1 from 81 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. 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: -- unstable24.1124.0523.1123.0522.1122.0521.1121.0520.0920.0319.0919.0318.0917.0916.0916.0315.09.101214.12.88514.04.63013.10.35728 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: 24.11 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-01-28 Votes: 8 From around 2008 to 2020 I used Ubuntu, but I was always interested in reproducible builds and was pointed to Nix and NixOS repeatedly. I started using Nix packages on Ubuntu but I switched to NixOS in 2020, starting with an NGINX server with Let's Encrypt, quickly moving on to laptops - Gnome, KDE Plasma, to i3 to sway (Wayland means no screen tearing, and I like the security model too). I needed an app for work (vmware-view) that needed pulseaudio, but then I realized pulseaudio had some pitch bugs that wouldn't be fixed, so I moved on to pipewire with pulseaudio api support. All of these options were a few short lines of config away. Being risk averse and also a bit lazy about modifying my system and setting up rollback and backup systems, NixOS gave me the confidence to try new things and steadfastly stick to the security models I want. In short, NixOS lets me safely attempt to add more features, with transparency (every package and option from search.nixos.org links to the git source directly), making me a power user with little effort, giving me direct control of Linux semantics in a self-documenting way. I used to demo it controlling my entire system from a single file, making observers declare their intent to install it tomorrow, but I have since broken it up by semantics into multiple files, using flakes and home manager. I strongly recommend NixOS! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-01-26 Votes: 3 I have used several distributions, from a number of Arch, Debian, RHEL derivatives and void just to name a few. NixOS is by far my favourite distro of all time. Its elegant configuration, package management, and reproducibility is a selling point unmatched by any other distro. Configuring all of my systems in the Nix language (which is functional and turing complete!) is an an absolute blast, even more so when combined with version control. I recently had to get my laptop repaired, and so before sending it off I just synced my system config on github and backed up my home directory to a USB then wiped the SSD, a few days later I get the laptop back and after a couple of commands from the installer USB and about 45 minutes it's like my laptop was never gone. The only downside is that, for any programs that you want to build or use that aren't in the nixpkgs repo (which is the largest package repo in the world), you must ensure that you create a sandboxed environment as NixOS doesn't follow the standard Unix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Creating development/package environments is relatively simple though. Other than that it is hands-down, in my humble opinion, one of the best distros ever. 10/10. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 24.11 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-01-23 Votes: 3 Nixos + XFCE is probably the most stable drama free setup I ever had: it gets the job done. At the end of the day, you just want an indestructible rock-solid distro. I basically just have to backup the file configuration.nix to be able to reproduce the exact same setup and the file is less than 5kb in size. It's very flexible and I would say it's a distro at your service. You can even make it a pure bleeding-edge distro by switching to the unstable channel and be able to rollback to a previous system state if things ever go wrong. There is a learning curve but if a carpenter like me can use this distro, I believe many other people can. I could not recommend it highly enough. Kudos to the devs who are doing an awesome job Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 81 reader reviews of NixOS...