NixOS: The Perfect Linux Distro? My Year of Pain and Lessons Learned
I was seduced by NixOS's promise of perfect system reproducibility through a single code configuration. After a year, I gave up. The learning curve is steep, documentation is lacking, error messages are opaque, and there are countless ways to do the same thing. While it creates a stable system, I spent countless hours wrestling with issues like Thunderbolt dock compatibility and setting up development environments across multiple tech stacks. I switched to Bazzite and Bluefin (based on Fedora Silverblue), which offer a more user-friendly experience through Flatpak, Homebrew, and Distrobox, while retaining the benefits of immutability. NixOS excels in server environments where reproducibility is paramount, but for the average desktop user, the high learning cost and complexity are not worth it. The key takeaway: sometimes, 'I don't want to care' is a perfectly valid approach to system administration.
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