Hi everyone, someone can explain, in simple words, why considering to switch on NixOs over other distro? And the use case? I think would help a lot of people (including me) to understand it better :D
The main difference of NixOS to other distros is that you configure your system declaratively. This means that installed system settings (e.g. user accounts, enabled drivers, etc.) programs and potentially also configuration for individual programs is all defined in a single place. The disadvantage of this is that a lot of stuff works differently than on “normal” distros and that it tends to have a rather steep learning curve. Unless you’re prepared to invest a significant amount of time into it, you should not install NixOS.
That being said, the topic is a lot more complex (for example, one can also use the Nix package manager on other distros than NixOS), so if you’re interested, here is some more discussion on the topic:
I wonder in practice how easy it is to copy your nix config to another machine. Sounds amazing but aren’t the configurations very hardware dependent?
Having tried it on multiple different it’s not seamless but it’s a damn sight better than setting up many machines manually
The configurations are not particularly hardware dependant as for the most part NixOS handles drivers and such transparently and just gets whatever it decides is best for your hardware (unless you override it)
The main hardware specific config I have is to use Nvidia proprietary drivers, as it defaults to nouvea
Tl:Dr 90% of your config will transfer and you have to do a little fiddling to get it all up and running but it’s all way easier than building from scratch
