I’m currently running Arch and it’s great, but I’m noticing I’m not staying on the ball in regards to updates. I’ve been reading a bit about Nix and NixOS and thinking of trying it as my daily driver. I’ve got a Lenovo x1 xtreme laptop, I don’t do much gaming (except OSRS), use firefox, jetbrains stuff, bitwarden, remmina, obsidian, and docker.

Is anyone running NixOS as their daily? How are you liking it and are there any pitfalls / stuff you wish you knew before?

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Daily driving it myself but have yet to really use flakes. What’s the benefit of them?

    • I use NixOS btw @lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re more reproducible, they make dependency management easier, the commands you use with them are easier to use and more readable, and it’s easier to have multiple packages/systems/home-manager profiles in a single git repo. They also make version management easier

      • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I’ve heard of the advantages of using them but still not entirely sure what they’re actually used for? What situation would call for using a flake?

        • I use NixOS btw @lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          For distributing software (nixpkgs is a flake and many projects have flakes), replacing channels (again, nixpkgs is a flake) or managing configs (check out my repo)

          • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            So the only use of flakes is for packaging software? Haven’t started packaging software for NixOS yet only managing my PC

            • iopq@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              No, it’s also for your system to use locked versions of deps, so if you git clone you get a flakes.lock as well with all the versions. When you install from a git repo you get the same system again

                • iopq@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Yes, you get the same version of deps and the actual software too. For example, wine breaks my game from time to time, but if I got clone my setup I will get the exact version of wine that I use that works, not the latest unstable version