After a couple of weeks since I crashed out with NixOS, I was injected by an unholy amount of obsession to find a better system, yet I found… none.
I simply refuse to bow down to my own skill issue, and throw therapy off the option list, and distance myself from the noisy internet. Crazy how I was wrong with my takes before. Now I can say with confidence: NixOS is the State of The Art of operating systems. Try me to change my mind.
A week ago was my funeral day with Windows 10, for my redemption I’m doing a journey to the wild west, where the penguins belong. I used Linux when I was a kid, it reminds me of how cool computers used to be. I have tasted a wide range of distros, environments, and systems.
In just a couple of weeks, my nostalgia strikes hard and makes me question why the Linux desktop now seems to have slowed its evolution since the 2010s.
Crazy how now a huge amount of small Linux projects that are out of sight cooler than any hype can ever reach cough, Omarchy… there is Archcraft with much more beautiful dotfiles and much choices of compositor than just Hyprland, yet out of sight.
Besides the frontend, I’m also obsessed with the backend of my puter, especially about sustainability and technical merit that can bring users into sense of wonders and creating, not just use for the sake of convenience.
Open source has software-distribution systems like Pacman, which is blatantly simple but naive like a chaotic kid, XBPS on Void-linux is a little bit better, apk on Alpine, good old deb, reliable rpm, sandboxed flatpak, the Chinese Linyaps and Kylin Kaiming, immutable OSTree and ABRoot, cloud-native containers like Podman, even now there are bootable containers, the init beyond systemd, and finally Nix.
I think the noise on the internet about what surrounds Nix: 99% of people have no idea how powerful it is. Once I got back and tried to look purely at the system, using, learn a bit proper, it gave me the same feeling as when I read the Bitcoin whitepaper. I think in 2008 Satoshi was a little bit drunk on an idea of how the digital object should be distributed while he looked at Eelco Dolstra 2004 Nix paper.
Anduril choosing Nix is not just for a dopamine moment, you silly, it is for the defense of the advanced military that has responsibility for millions of human souls. But again, the noise around NixOS on the internet is just unnecessarily stupid.
In less than two months of daily-driving NixOS, I find the almost-perfect system with dendritic patterns, beyond what flakes can do. It’s so beautiful, it’s unreal for an open-source operating system to have such a thing.
Now I find peace of mind using NixOS as my host system, I can even suppress the amount of ram to less than a gig, and with KVM GPU passthrough run other OSes as if they were native on top of NixOS while it still stays an immutable and hackable system, and I just switch it to gaming, work, or lightweight mode whenever I want.
I try other options, but there is no better option, even Guix the only competitor didn’t came close. Even though almost every traditional imperative system tackles its own problem, it can’t match, can’t become what Nix can do.
No, I’m not a distro stan, I look at an operating system as a tool-level piece of software for my wants and needs. I need a system for long life commitment, my daily, my habit, hosting on my own device, and I choose NixOS as the core while I can still hop into Windows, other Linux packages in containers, other coolness in virtual machines. And yeah, Xfce is the Goat, and Enlightenment desktop is the most underrated, I’m enlightened!
I will heal myself, touch grass, go back to the mountains, breathe like a tech monk, and pay for the amount of sleepless nights. I really want to share my Nix infrastructure when I feel confident and safe enough to do it.
I’m obsessed with Nix, and I’m glad I had the courage to learn and understand it.