I’ve been running NixOS for the past four years in all my computers. It’s really, really the end game of Linux distributions for me. But it’s not for everybody. The Nix language can be a tough thing to learn, if you’re not a programmer and haven’t done anything with lazy functional languages before. It’s a dynamic language, with not super great documentation for practical things and missing a good language server that would let you to jump to definitions when learning how nixpkgs work and how to build things.

Also, what I think is a serious problem, is how flakes are not yet enabled in the default installation. So first you learn with the basic template, and some helpful person comes talking about how great flakes are, and in a few weeks you might have written your own system flake finally and got it working. Flakes are really important to understand as soon as possible, because with them you get the lock file that gives you real reproducibility between computers and full control on which version of packages you get.

But, when you learn all that, and get your company to go full-on with nix, having flakes in all projects, it’s the best programmer’s operating system out there. Here’s my config to steal stuff.