So, I’m an arch-btwistan, what does nixos do for a gamer/youtuber/low-tier-wannabe-musician? Legit asking, because I really don’t know what makes nixos tick, and the (very little) I’ve read doesn’t really explain the benefits of it
Very well built patches and ways to share them. This is a good thing for gaming as we can try bleeding edge like Arch. But without having to rely on AUR or scripts to copy locally. Thanks to Nix Flakes you simply reference the flake someone shared (after double checking what is in it) and rebuild a NixOS derivation and voila, patch installed. I installed a complete SteamOS in 1 minute with this, reboot and everything works. Even with your locally signed in Steam account 👌
nothing imo, it’s main benefit is making reproducible environments, imagine you need 10 machines to have the exact same things running on it, setting up each one would be a PITA and keeping them the same is near impossible, nixos solves that problem.
it’s not gonna do anything for you, most people just want a working OS system on your PC so that you can do the things you need to do, if you have that, there is no reason to be fucking around with nixos.
Everything about your OS is defined in a config files and can be rebuilt. You break something you don’t need to do a complete reinstall if you can’t figure it out. Just rebuild the last working configuration. Sharing builds with your friends is easier.
For gaming getting your graphics card going is much simpler. I never had steam and proton games run as well as they do with they nixos defaults
Basically but it’s better, nix has a unique way of doing the underlying the logic which as is own benefits. Also since nix is not a container it doesn’t have any of the speed penalties that come along with that. Since nix is functional as well, it means all operations can be undone. So where you might te build a docker image from scratch or by using a A/B system like other immutable distros it allows nix to just modify the system while it’s running with minimal side effects.
Imo the worst part of nix is how it turns into this chicken or the egg scenario. Let me explain, nix is very good at reproducing things. It ensures that all things are the same when installing a piece of software. Once someone writes a nix module, generally speaking, it “just works”. You can always take that nix file and get it to run the same way on another machine. But since most gamers/musicians don’t give two shits about reproducible software, it doesn’t get packaged. And with no packages they will never be interested to get into nix.
As I write this though I realize, many open source projects have struggled with getting contributions from the community. Personally, I just think nix solves the issue of “idk, it works on my machine” better than anything I’ve seen. Being able to reproduce software and stop dependency issues is a very valuble thing, just not for everyone.
