this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Hmm, I personally place Nix at the same level as Arch, because I see both distros being hard to get into because of how different they do stuff when compared to the average OS.
Maybe the real level up is trying to run BSD on unsupported hardware?
Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple
/etc/nixos/configuration.nixmaybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff likelib.mapAttrs, I'd say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complexoverrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn't have an equivalent to that...I didn't need to learn a programming language to install Arch btw. I'd definitely agree Nix is an unnecessary complication for very little gain for the average user.
Well, you don't need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the
configuration.nixpart was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn't say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can't go wrong with it
No no, there isn't "no benefit". There's just very little gain, compared to the effort. The average Linux user definitely will not care about reproducibility. 😅 So the effort required to either add Nix stuff to an existing distro or install NixOS itself will just be wasted effort for most people, I imagine. Myself included.
As a power user, I'm still not interested. Chezmoi serves me more than well to sync between my work laptop and my main desktop PC, because I'm running Arch on both systems and I still haven't had the need to reproduce a system in over a decade with Arch. 🥰 So stable.
But yeah if you reinstall frequently or manage a lot of machines daily then it might be worth looking into. 👌
I think a lot of people do care about it, just not under that name. But I think a lot of users asked themselves at least once "what did I do back then to achieve X". Not in that the whole system is reproduced 1:1, but certain aspects. That's something much easier to answer with nix.
I think the average user only cares about that if they have to do it again. Or to help a friend perhaps. But then the answer would be "use nix" and that's not super helpful if you're offering support. 😆
I've had to go back to investigate certain things when installing a new system but it's all in the Arch wiki for me, and sometimes there's even newer and better ways of doing stuff after a while so just keeping my system set once and for all might not be what I really want anyway.
Change is life. 😌
The real level up is bare-metal Emacs.
Shame this OS does not come with a solid text editor.
Text editors are bloat, I only use punch cards
Let's skip all intermediate quotes and directly jump to the xkcd reference: I only program with butterflies. Of course, there is an Emacs command for that: good ol' C-x M-c M-butterfly