💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~wanderingwires › blog › adventures-in-nix.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:19:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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So I've been a bit bored with Arch Linux and annoyed with how often I need to reinstall it so I wanted to drift back to Nix. I used it once upon a time years ago before I came out as trans and when I was interning at Boeing😣 but back then it was a little shakey and I remember having to do a lot of stuff manually or in a kinda hacky way so I was nervous upon returning. However I can say my fears were unfounded 'cause I ended up loving it!
So the install process I remember before was a pretty involved manual install process not dissimilar from Gentoo. However, this time I was presented with a great graphical installer. Except for the fact that it by doesn't set up swap on encrypted root by default which can cause problems down the line. However, the ability to set up encrypted root at all in the graphical install process is really nice so NixOS, while needing improvement, does a good job here.
Package installs don't take too long typically so long as [cachix][https://www.cachix.org/] is set up but when you do need to compile something yourself, this distro becomes a bit more Gentoo like. However, for the trade off you get a lot of control via overrides (however figuring these out has a bit of a learning curve). I was really impressed how many packages were available and I've only ever had one application (lxappearance) which didn't work as installed (an [issue][https://www.cachix.org/] is open on it) which is pretty impressive. Rollbacks are also an absolutely incredible feature that has saved me several times.
The Nix ecosystem is truly incredible; tons of high quality packages, pretty good documentation for the ambition of the project, and an active and passionate community on matrix and discourse. Since a linux distro is only is good as it's community in my opinion, this is fantastic. Not only that, nix integrations are all over the place ([nix-direnv][https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv/], [crane][https://github.com/ipetkov/crane] are some I've been looking at) and the quality of these integrations seems to be quite good.
Overall, I've been having a lot of fun with NixOS so far. The paradigm and rollback ability are so incredibly cool that it makes up for the issues I've had. It's even sort of fun to fix errors in NixOS (but that might just be me) and I feel like I've been learning a lot about the system just by using it. Next is to actually learn the Nix language so I can write packages.
By the way, if you wanna check out my disaster of a nixos config, [here][https://git.sr.ht/~x4d6165/nix-configuration] you go
bye :3
Mae Miller copyleft 2023