Perhaps dumb questions inbound ;)
I use Arch because I’m strapped for time and my system is always moving.
-
2 minutes to install something? AUR probably has it.
-
Ten minutes of free time to look for a software that fits a new need? Try random AUR things (auditing PKGBUILDs is just twenty seconds or so).
-
If I need a tiny patch, I’ll just add a sed or patch file to the PKGBUILD. (Super easy, you barely learn any syntax cuz it’s intuitive shell.)
-
make && make install/meson blahblahusually just works. -
Wiki does the thinking for me if I need something special (e.g. hw video acceleration)
Buuuut update surprises can be a pain (e.g. Pipewire explodes Saturday evening) and declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin’ AWESOME, so I’m considering NixOS for my new laptop (old one’s webcam broke). So I ask:
- How much can I grok in a week?
- I need to know Nixlang, right? I have a ton of dotfiles and random homemade cpp commands in ~/.local/bin that I use daily
- How quick is it to make a derivation?
- I
make installa lot, do I need to declare that due to non-FHS? Can I boilerplate the whole thing with someone else’smake installand ctrl+c ctrl+v? How does genAI fare? (Lemmy hates word guess bots, I know)
- I
- How quick is it to install something new and random?
- Do I just use
nix-shellif I need something asap? Do I need to make a derivation for all my programs? e.g. do I need to declare a Hyprland plugin I’m test-running?
- Do I just use
- How long do you research a new package for?
- On Gentoo I always looked up USE flags (NOO my time); on Arch I just audit the PKGBUILD and test-run it (20 seconds); on Ubuntu I had to find the relevant PPA (2 minutes). What’s it like for Nix?
- Can you set up dev environments quickly or do you need to write a ton of configs?
- I hear python can be annoying. Do C++/Android Studio have header file/etc. issues?
- What maintenance ouchies do you run into? How long to rectify?
- Do I need to finagle on my own to have /boot encrypted?
- I boot via: unencrypted EFI grub asks for LUKS password -> decrypt /boot, which then has a keyfile -> decrypt and mount btrfs root partition. But lots of guides don’t do it this way
Thanks for bearing with me ദ്ദി(｡•̀ヮ<)~✩‧₊
With that said, it took me about a month of playing and experimenting with NixOS in a VM casually, a couple of hours a week, to get comfortable and commit to switching. It’s a lot easier once you switched, though.
yeah, OP should probably setup NixOS in a vm first and apply all their configs in there
