On: XMonad – The Automated Tiling WM

[rgoulter]

> I am far past the days where I'd delight in tweaking my Linux installation to my personal tastes. If I could have a git repo with a static config that just built my OS the way I like it with minimal messing around, I would love that. I've heard NixOS is meant to work like that but I haven't found the time to try it.

NixOS is neat.

And "OS setup from git repo" is something NixOS is excellent at.

However, the effort it would take for you to come up with your own NixOS configuration would be much greater than what it would take for you to just re-configure your system each time & keep notes (or write the commands down as scripts).

I think the dissuading points under "Should I use NixOS?" are pretty good. https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles#frequently-asked-questi...

[qudat → rgoulter]

This was the realization I came to when I booted up a NixOS VM to start building my configuration. I recently borked my Arch install and had to start from scratch. It took me about 4 hours to get my system back where I left it — all I brought with me were my dotfiles.

I just cannot imagine I would spend less than 4 hours figuring out NixOS and its DSL. Even if I setup a fresh OS twice a year I just don’t see it being worth my effort — beyond learning a cool new OS.

Arch works well for me and I like the package ecosystem / rolling releases.

[fiddlerwoaroof → qudat]

Nix’s payoff is moving to use it for dev projects as well as your base OS config. I’ve been using it instead of the standard mix of brew/bundler/nvm/etc. everyone uses to setup their development environment for React native or instead of pip/venv and couldn’t be happier: no globally installed tools with conflicting versions, just a .envrc and a shell.nix in each project. (No one else on the team uses nix this way, but, in a year or so, I’ve not run into any issues)