my experience with NixOS

2025-09-19

I've had NixOS as my primary distro for quite some time now, 1 month I might say.
For everything that I went through to make my system usable, I would say, it's not that bad?
If you just use configuration.nix and hates flakes, and home-manager, yes you would've agreed with me, but
even cared about giving flakes a real chance?

my past experience.

Ever since then, I've only used NixOS with configuration.nix, avoiding flakes entirely, after some time using Arch, I felt the need to try NixOS with flakes, and so I did, following the Ryan Rin's guide, NixOS & Flakes Book, but, with little to no patience, of having everything setup now, without actually understanding why using flakes, why using home-manager, the result was a mess, and I retreated to Arch, and never thought about NixOS ever again.

my current experience.

After quite a while using Arch, I was a bit annoyed about how messy was my system, how I needed nvm, some kind of zig version manager, and a whole lot of things, and my system felt really messy.
That's when NixOS came into my mind again, and using flakes to manage my projects was really making me actually use NixOS, and so I did, this time actually wanting to understand how did it worked and how it would improve my workflow. Little did I know it was one of the best decisions I've made. Making every project "isolated" from the rest of my system, without polluting my main path and without worrying about managing mutiple versions on path & etc. If you ever used NixOS and felt awkward with flakes and home-manager, give it try, it's definitely worth it!