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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I'm currently running Arch and it's great, but I'm noticing I'm not staying on the ball in regards to updates. I've been reading a bit about Nix and NixOS and thinking of trying it as my daily driver. I've got a Lenovo x1 xtreme laptop, I don't do much gaming (except OSRS), use firefox, jetbrains stuff, bitwarden, remmina, obsidian, and docker.

Is anyone running NixOS as their daily? How are you liking it and are there any pitfalls / stuff you wish you knew before?

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

They're more reproducible, they make dependency management easier, the commands you use with them are easier to use and more readable, and it's easier to have multiple packages/systems/home-manager profiles in a single git repo. They also make version management easier

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've heard of the advantages of using them but still not entirely sure what they're actually used for? What situation would call for using a flake?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

For distributing software (nixpkgs is a flake and many projects have flakes), replacing channels (again, nixpkgs is a flake) or managing configs (check out my repo)

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So the only use of flakes is for packaging software? Haven't started packaging software for NixOS yet only managing my PC

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

No, it's also for your system to use locked versions of deps, so if you git clone you get a flakes.lock as well with all the versions. When you install from a git repo you get the same system again

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So it's a way to ensure you always get the exact same version of dependencies?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, you get the same version of deps and the actual software too. For example, wine breaks my game from time to time, but if I got clone my setup I will get the exact version of wine that I use that works, not the latest unstable version

this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
204 points (98.1% liked)

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