Hi, everybody!

I’ve been toying with the idea of switching to NixOS for some time. I’m currently on arch (6 months), and while I like the idea of a minimal, only-what-I-want-installed, hackable system with the newest packages, I think having a system that always works, even if an update goes south, is more important to me.

Now, I’m still not sure if I should switch. There are some issues I’m worried about, maybe unnecessarily.

For one, what are the trade-offs of switching from Arch? Anything I have to watch out for? I’ve heard there are some issues with regard to the FSH and gaming, or just FSH in general, or just gaming in general. Secondly, the dotfiles. I hear there is the Home Manager for that, but it doesn’t have support for everything, so some files would need to be managed in other ways. Is there a way to manage everything at the same time? Even better if everything is in configuration.nix. I thought of using env.etc.xxx.source and .text to link the dotlifes to the etc folder and change the contents, but it feels… cheap and unsafe to do that. Third, are flakes really that important? I hear about them everywhere, I haven’t researched them yet, but I’m curious what the fuss is about.

Let me know if there is anything else I should consider. I mainly game, watch videos and sometimes play with the system if needed. I’m not sure if I really want to switch, or is it just “oooo, new shiny and cool” thing lol

Thanks :)

  • @rutrumAEnglish
    5•9 months ago

    If you want to switch slowly, I would install nix and home manager on your Arch system, and slowly migrate your dotfiles, configuration, and packages into home manager. That will give you a comfortable transition opportunity to learn nix. Then, the last 10% of system configuration you can figure out when you install NixOS, and you can just pull in your home manager config for all your userspace dotfiles and programs. Thats how I moved from Ubuntu to NixOS.

    And yes, you can have home manager just symlink existing config files to the appropriate location. You don’t have to rewrite everything in nix.