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Comment by ChaseRensberger | Hacker News Reader

im sure nixos is fantastic but honestly i just love arch so much i cant imagine ever using anything else.

I used Arch for about a decade before trying out NixOS unstable channel. I won't be migrating back. Everything is much tighter and saner. Only complaint that I'd have is that the pull request merges and package builds lag behind a bit, but I've grown used to that. It's up-to-date enough.

pacman and AUR are just so peak, nix os is cool but if you dont care a ton about reproducible builds, idk

One strength of nixpkgs that probably appeals to Arch users too is how much software is available and how easily you can just re-compile apps with custom patches. In fact, the latter is enabled exactly through reproducibility :)

That said, cool if pacman and AUR work for you, no need to change just for the sake of it!

Yes, AUR is one of the things that brought me to Arch back in the day. I was really tired of building and maintaining my own .debs.

I'd say Nix is even easier than pacman/AUR from a maintenance perspective because you can create overlays for whatever you'd like to change and not worry about the mechanics of building your own packages. The overrides are just maintained in the flake or nix config. Also there are already a huge amount of packages in the nixpkgs repo (probably more than base Arch + AUR.)

Do you have experience with gaming on NixOS, particularly the Steam/Proton ecosystem? Recent non-reproducible distros like CachyOS and Bazzite have made gaming on Linux extremely accessible. Wondering how this fares in NixOS.

Steam (and games) all work flawlessly. Even streaming VR to my Quest 2 and flatscreen to my TV works perfect.

Yes. I run NixOS on 5 machines, one of which is a gaming laptop with an Nvidia card that makes heavy use of Steam and Proton. It works fantastic and is so much less of a headache than Windows.

Gaming works extremely well. You can even get a SteamOS-like experience via Jovian, which is basically an overlay that provides a curated set of packages and configs.

I'm on Arch too, but after installing NixOS on two side laptops I have, I kinda fell in love. I don't want to go through reconfiguring everything, but once this laptop dies, I'm going to switch.

Arch is really great, but using the system now for ~5 years I cannot remember where every configuration is, which packages are installed and why, and things just get messy. I'm sure that some issues the system has are do to things I screwed up along the way, and these will be solved if I just reinstall. But with NixOS it feels so easy to find what changes you've done to the system, to leave a comment saying why etc. It feels to me much more maintainable.

all good points, i think it really is just a preference thing, i keep config files in github via chezmoi and then just chezmoi apply on different machines.

i agree things get a bit messy but i try to keep the OS in a state where I can reinstall at any time without any trouble.

config files on github, pacman -S any tools i need, important docs all in the cloud already, couldnt get much simpler than that imo

i do get the desire to have a reproducible OS, just dont know that its something i need

Similar on my arch setup but using gnu stow + git-store-meta, and a little wrapper that reminds me if a particular config previously applied has had new files added to it and should be re-stow'd

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