Thinking of switching to NixOS, but I'm not sure about a few things - eviltoast

Hi, everybody!

I’ve been toying with the idea of switching to NixOS for some time. I’m currently on arch (6 months), and while I like the idea of a minimal, only-what-I-want-installed, hackable system with the newest packages, I think having a system that always works, even if an update goes south, is more important to me.

Now, I’m still not sure if I should switch. There are some issues I’m worried about, maybe unnecessarily.

For one, what are the trade-offs of switching from Arch? Anything I have to watch out for? I’ve heard there are some issues with regard to the FSH and gaming, or just FSH in general, or just gaming in general. Secondly, the dotfiles. I hear there is the Home Manager for that, but it doesn’t have support for everything, so some files would need to be managed in other ways. Is there a way to manage everything at the same time? Even better if everything is in configuration.nix. I thought of using env.etc.xxx.source and .text to link the dotlifes to the etc folder and change the contents, but it feels… cheap and unsafe to do that. Third, are flakes really that important? I hear about them everywhere, I haven’t researched them yet, but I’m curious what the fuss is about.

Let me know if there is anything else I should consider. I mainly game, watch videos and sometimes play with the system if needed. I’m not sure if I really want to switch, or is it just “oooo, new shiny and cool” thing lol

Thanks :)

  • zonsopkomst@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    I switched from Arch to NixOS around Nov 2023 and manage my systems and my family’s off of one flake. Dotfiles are managed within my flake (if easier), an exception would be Emacs, which I use syncthing between my Nix systems and a work Windows PC with straight.

    Discourse, Discord/Matrix, the wiki and various blogs are places to learn from. Documentation is sometimes difficult to splice together, other times very intuitive, but others can help direct you. Just leave some lead time for people to get back to you.

    If you can figure out how to do gaming on Arch, you can figure it out on NixOs. Add to you config or flake slowly and back it up somehow before making changes, along with important files. You can always rollback or if you do manage to nuke it (I have twice due to lack of HD memory), reinstall and be up and running in a short time frame as long as you have your config somewhere.

    I’ve done more on NixOS in a shorter time than I ever had on Arch, but also learned a lot from Arch which helped. Try it out on an old machine or VM to see what you can do with it. I’ve plateaued at getting a server up and running, and ricing hyprland, but that is due to lack of time and close to zero knowledge.