Sorry for not answering sooner - got bogged down with work yesterday. I see you already got a response, but thought I’d write up what I had in mind anyways :)

The benefits

I want a computer that just works, to the extent that that’s possible. I’ll fix stuff that needs fixing, but ideally I don’t need to do much.

That’s great, and good news, this is very easy to achieve with NixOS.

As the other commenter said, rather than (imperatively) running commands like apt install, you configure the entire system through your “nix config”. In the simplest scenario, that’s just a single file which gets auto-generated when you install NixOS, and if all you need/want is to add some packages, then that’s enough (I’ll get to different approaches below). In other words, NixOS is declarative rather than imperative: you use the config file to “declare” what the system should look like, and it’s Nix’s job to ensure that your system adheres to this.

I need to emphasize though, that this is not just about packages, but about every single piece of configuration you could possibly touch on your system. I am currently managing 30+ NixOS machines from a single centralized config, and I have not once edited or even opened a single config files on any of these machines, ever.

Nix comes with a vast package repository: , but just as importantly, with a vast collection of “modules”. Think of modules as an abstraction for all the little things you would need to configure to get something running.

Let’s take everyone’s nightmare configuration as an example, getting Nvidia GPUs to function properly. This is the ArchWiki article on how to do so, and the Debian Wiki does not make it look any simpler. For NixOS, it should be as simple as adding this to your nix configuration file:

hardware.nvidia.enable = true;
hardware.nvidia.open = true; # use the open source drivers; set to false if you want the proprietary ones
hardware.nvidia.nvidiaSettings = true; # optional - will enable the Nvidia settings menu

Of course, all the same complicated steps as with any other distro are necessary “under the hood”, it’s just that with NixOS, someone else already has “declared” what the system needs to look like for Nvidia GPUs to work, and abstracted it behind these easy-to-use config options. There’s currently more than 20.000 such configs options defined, which sounds intimidating, but you only need to use those you actually want to use. For example, let’s say you want to install and configure a jellyfin server.

Again, all that is necessary to be up and running is

services.jellyfin.enable = true;

but if you want to customize the install, you can simply search for all available options. Also note that if you ever disagree with how a package/module is built/installed/configured, you can just overwrite the “official” way, though at least in my experience, that is basically never necessary.

OK, back to you.

Let’s say you have successfully configured the system as you want it to be - KDE5 installed, your favorite packages installed, Steam configured with programs.steam.enable = true;. Now the worst case happens, and your SSD hits the shitter; it’s dead, completely unrecoverable.

Good news: as long as you have a copy of that configuration.nix file, you can be up and running with the a new harddrive and exactly your same, old system in a matter of minutes.

Another scenario, let’s say you manage to brick your install (somehow). No sweat, reboot your PC, the previously used NixOS configuration is available as a grub (or systemd-boot) entry. Does not matter if you ripped out all the drivers, switched from KDE to Gnome in the mean time or anything else.

Essentially, disaster recovery is easy in NixOS, even if it is necessary very, very rarely, because nix will already warn you “yeah this doesn’t work” when you are building the system.

The Nix language

You have already seen some of it above. Most people say NixOS is not a beginner distro, and that opinion is mostly due to the Nix language. It’s… not pretty, but its learning curve is not bad if you just want to do “basic” stuff like configuring your system in the way shown above. For more advanced topics, there is a steep, but not very long learning curve. If that is worth it is up to you; there is no need for it, but it does allow you to write your own modules, and to leverage a full turing-complete programming language inside your configuration. But IMO, just learn as you go, no need to try and study the language just to use NixOS.

Going wild

For a single machine, the single configuration.nix file is perfectly fine. If yo only have a single machine anyways, I’d say stick with that.

As soon as it’s 2 or more machines though, it makes sense to move the configuration elsewhere, in a single project which you can back up (usually, via git). This also allows you to reuse parts of your config - for example, if your user is always the same, and KDE should always be there,…, you can define that once and then import that into the inidividual machine’s config. You then simply tell nix “build this config on that machine”.

There are a ton of awesome projects in the “nix ecosystem”, so to speak, which you can also leverage: for example, you can add home-manager to your config, and then use your existing configuration but extend it with config for inidividual users’ environments, like customizing KDE itself, configuring git, ssh, your terminal,… You said you are not a customizer, so this probably does not apply to you that much, but it’s still good to know that it is easily possible.

Other projects add capability for secure secrets management, for things like turning Nix into a very good approximation of SteamOS,…

TL;DR:

NixOS makes tedious things simple, and disaster recovery trivial. It offers more (and fresher) packages then even the allmighty AUR, while being stable as a rock.

You will never have to re-solve a problem, no matter how long ago you originally solved it.

Nice!

How much do you know of nix? (Just gauging where I should start in my propaganda script :D)

Ah, understandable.

May I talk to you about our lord and savio, NixOS? (Only kinda /s)

Is this really a common occurrence for you, that the package isn’t available via apt?

Matrix fits the bill.

Unless you don’t like the federated nature.

Neovim, because I wanted something that would not just disappear.

I never really got along with VSCode, opting for Atom instead. Microsoft bought GitHub, which owned Atom, and promptly discontinued it.

Nvim has such an active community (and no “owner”) that I’m certain that this won’t happen again. At the same time, the plugin system is so flexible that I’m also certain that I will never miss out on any shiny new features.

Over the years, my config has matured, and is mine. The thought of going back to an editor, any editor, less flexible in its configuration than nvim is just… an absolute “no”.

It’s a steep learning curve, but well worth it.

A photo of yourself, naked, in that very shower. With your dick enlarged to a comical size. (Or shrunk.) (Yes this is a gender neutral suggestion.)

Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.

It sucks that these people exist, for many reasons. One of these reasons (surely not the worst one, but the one I want to focus on) is that it muddies all criticism of a project. Your comment implied that this was the sole, or main, reason that The Acolyte was canceled, so I want to jump in here to say:

Having more women, people of color, and queer characters was the only refreshing thing about The Acolyte, and I wish more Star Wars projects took notice. Other than that though, the show is an utter disaster. It was incompetently written and directed, its story and characters make no sense, and the effects can be jarring.

Characters either have no defined motivations, or their motivations flip flop at the drop of a hat. Scenes dealing with the Jedi order and the republic fuck with established lore and do lasting damage to the Jedi order (not in the sense that they are shown as morally gray, but in that they are utterly incompetent and seemingly don’t remember the appearance of the Sith during living memory, for example).

Speaking of which, yes, the show tries to portray Jedi/Sith as a gray area, but

a) that has been done to death at this point, seriously, every other SW project tries to do a “ooooh but maybe Jedi not completely good!”, and b) The Acolyte is probably the most incompetent version of that I have seen (so far!).

I hope I have demonstrated that this show can be critiqued bar any bigotry, and I think it should be acknowledged that that, together with the giant sum of money it ate, are the reasons it got canceled - I am sure Disney also does not like the bigotry, but sadly, they get that with every project, even those that do not get canceled…

In any case, there is no comparison to Andor to be made, SMH.

Pimsleur. It’s very different than Duolingo, in that it is almost entirely audio-based. However, at least in my experience, it actually gets you to the point of speaking and understanding a language much more rapidly than Duolingo. Way, way less gamified though. It expects you to put in half an hour a day where you just concentrate on the lesson.

To clone their voice, and to send the audio to some unknown server

Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.

In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.

For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.

Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.

With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:

• all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
• my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
• creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…

Naja OK, sie ist Netzwerktechnikerin. Auf Feuerwänden o.Ä. hat sie sehr viel mehr Erfahrung und Durchhaltevermögen. Aber bei Linux reicht es, dass in keiner Desktopumgebung die Netzwerkinfos beim Maus-Hovern über dem Netzwerksymbol nach ihrem Geschmack formatiert ist…

Hm, habe leider beide nie gespielt. Schon auf protondb.com geschaut, ob die Empfehlungen da helfen? Beide Spiele sind zumindest als Gold angegeben

Tut mir Leid zu hören, welche denn?

Sehr basiert. Pinguin sei mit dir!

Ich kann meine Partnerin leider nicht überzeugen. Sie ist Informatikerin, braucht keinerlei properitäre Weichware, aber lässt sich von den kleinsten Kleinigkeiten abbringen

That’s great. Hope other states follow suite.

The original Lego Racers. Works really well on the deck, is Lego themed, and is just an all-round fun game.

Child-me spent countless hours with it, adult-me beat it in under 2 hours. Fair warning though: the title screen song will get stuck in your head

Oh yeah rust tooling is insanely good ootb

I’m too lazy to insert the “look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power” meme here, so… Please imagine it instead.

I’m switching jobs in a couple of months, and I am SO glad to be leaving a (very well maintained!!) python codebase with type hints and mypy for a rust codebase.

It is just not the same.

Bei mir (ewig her) war der Druck und das Leiden schon jahrelang präsent, aber ich hatte quasi keine Bildung im Bezug auf trans Menschen und ihre Erfahrungen. Trans als Begriff war mir irgendwo bekannt, aber als abstraktes Konzept, nicht als Sache, die “ganz normale” Leute wie ich sein konnten.

Hab irgendwann absolut zufällig einen Erfahrungs- bzw. Rauskommensbericht einer trans Frau gelesen, und mit ziemlicher Panik festgestellt: das ist 1:1 mein Erfahren und meine Gefühle. Oh fuck oh shit.

Hat auf einen Schlag jahrelange Ängste und Leiden rekontextualisiert. Bin quasi in einem Nachmittag trans “geworden”.