I was able to go zero to Nix in probably 6-10 hours, and could’ve done it sooner if I’d known about this sooner (and I’m not a super technical person).
Honestly you should ! Unless you want to do crazy stuff you actually don’t need to learn the entire documentation.
I was able to setup full disk encryption with encrypted boot loader pretty easily, there are great tutorials out there. I’m going to figure out Secure Boot next.
The nice thing is that once you’ve managed to do something, it’s in your config forever. My main problem with Arch was the absence of rollbacks, and having to remember all the stuff you do when installing it that you inevitably forget before the next time your system breaks and needs a reinstall. There’s none of that with Nix, and it’s awesome.
I’d say it’s definitely worth it. I don’t actually use nixos itself, but I do use nix a lot. I have everything I need for work in a home manager configuration, so I can literally just install nix and load up my config and have all programs and configuration of said programs installed and ready to go (on any UNIX system). I started doing this since changing jobs means a new machine, and I got really tired of all of the inconsistencies between machines when bringing over my dotfiles, and having to install a bunch of packages I use every time I changed jobs.
I do want to make the switch from Arch to nixos on my personal machine eventually too, but I hardly spend any time on computers outside of work these days, unfortunately. But the great thing is that my home manager configuration can pretty easily slide right into a nixos configuration, which is what many people do.
NGL I was THIS close to actually looking into trying nixos out, I mean the concept is intriguing.
But after seeing that…
I was able to go zero to Nix in probably 6-10 hours, and could’ve done it sooner if I’d known about this sooner (and I’m not a super technical person).
Honestly you should ! Unless you want to do crazy stuff you actually don’t need to learn the entire documentation.
I was able to setup full disk encryption with encrypted boot loader pretty easily, there are great tutorials out there. I’m going to figure out Secure Boot next.
The nice thing is that once you’ve managed to do something, it’s in your config forever. My main problem with Arch was the absence of rollbacks, and having to remember all the stuff you do when installing it that you inevitably forget before the next time your system breaks and needs a reinstall. There’s none of that with Nix, and it’s awesome.
I’d say it’s definitely worth it. I don’t actually use nixos itself, but I do use nix a lot. I have everything I need for work in a home manager configuration, so I can literally just install nix and load up my config and have all programs and configuration of said programs installed and ready to go (on any UNIX system). I started doing this since changing jobs means a new machine, and I got really tired of all of the inconsistencies between machines when bringing over my dotfiles, and having to install a bunch of packages I use every time I changed jobs.
I do want to make the switch from Arch to nixos on my personal machine eventually too, but I hardly spend any time on computers outside of work these days, unfortunately. But the great thing is that my home manager configuration can pretty easily slide right into a nixos configuration, which is what many people do.