Using NixOS, and becoming friends with my computer again

2025-12-15

Originally, I set out to write about my experiences moving to NixOS and the struggles of managing a non FHS-compliant sytem, knowing what FHS even is. Admittedly this might have been a warning sign and I should have maybe tried another Linux distribution. But unlike my first experience with Linux being on Arch, this time with NixOS I decided that it was worth learning the system, and more importantly, that I am able to do so in reasonable time.

After 800 words and some considerable procrastination I decided I did not want to write a long technical piece on how to deal with various challenges in setting up NixOS. Any issues I've had are much better dealt with by the NixOS wiki, or in some cases the excellent Arch wiki. And any code snippets I have written for my specific use case are unlikely to be so general as to be useful for random people. NixOS is a very flexible distribution after all.

How did we get here?

I have used Linux for about 4 years now, I started with Arch, and quickly realized that had too steep of a learning curve for a mere psychology student, and thus retreated to Fedora. Fedora worked fine until I wanted to do anything with CUDA, for some reason I could not get this to work consistently, and out of frustration switched to Pop OS. Not only did Pop OS handle Nvidia's driver hell flawlessly, it also felt a lot more robust to my tinkering. Of course this might simply be because my tinkering became less destructive, but I would like to give Pop OS some credit for never completely breaking on me.

Why NixOS?

Pop OS worked just fine, so if it wasn't broken, what did I need to fix? Technically nothing, my system worked, code I wrote worked on all my machines when using tools such as `uv`, and I had my shell scripts and aliases synced through a git repo. That being said, the programs I had on different machines were not always synced. This resulted in some frustration when working on my laptop and finding out that it did not have the programs I expected. Furthermore, I wanted to experiment with different desktop environments, specifically infinite horizontal scrolling using Niri. The Gnome extension designed to simulate this effect simply did not work well.

Having laid out my reasons for switching, I decided NixOS not only was capable of supplying everything I wanted. It also was flexible enough to allow me to change my desktop environments whenever I wanted.

Now, after about 4 months of using NixOS, I would not dare to say that this was an easy switch, it was however basically what I wanted. Not only that, it has made updates completely boring, and stress-free.

How refreshing

Usually updating anything is either exciting, or infuriating. Updating your phone? Better hope that the new improvements have not removed or hidden any of your favorite features. Updating your Windows machine? Let's see what security holes are introduced! And also more Ads! 'Updating' a code base? Better hope that your dependencies don't make the SAT solver sad.

As much as I would like to pretend updates on Linux are better, it really is not. The likelihood of functionality being removed/obfuscated is smaller, but in my experience the likelihood of a random sudo apt upgrade finishing successfully is not great...

This is where NixOS shines. Firstly, since the entire system is configured in plain .nix files and one .lock file, your entire system's specification can be tracked using git. So when it comes to updating, if an update fails, you can simply revert to the previous version without any issues. If you have time, it might then be a good idea to figure out why it is failing, and in the case of a singular program causing this failure, to temporarily disable it.

Finally, NixOS makes the installation and setup of many programs almost trivially easy. For example, enabling Bluetooth is as simple as:

hardware.bluetooth.enable = true;

For programs such as ssh, NixOS even handles the systemctl entries for you! Combined with the extremely large number of packages supported by the nix package manager, I have pretty much every program I use declared in a nix file.

However...

NixOS has been great, and yet another way in which I have been able to learn more about my computing environment. But all this learning was mostly because things often did not work straight out of the box.

Things often break, and the only reason this is not a dealbreaker, is because breaking is often not disastrous. Setting up coding environments can be extremely inconvenient, especially as the number of dependencies grow (looking at you PyTorch). NixOS also feels a lot less transparent than something like Arch or even regular Ubuntu, this is might be mostly because of inexperience, but the location of important files, and the machinery of installations are often still foreign to me.

For good

I hope to be using NixOS for a long time, even with the numerous drawbacks, it is an elegant solution to problems I had using multiple machines, and is about as close to a distribution like Arch I want to be using. But more importantly than these problems, NixOS makes me feel more in control of, and at peace with, my computers. A feeling I sadly do not feel with (m)any other devices.