NixOS

Long-term owners

I have been using Nixos for the past 5 years. And I really use the power of nix/nixos since Codex is doing good code with it.

Jun 2026 · comment

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 916 comments. Each links to the original.

1. it's particularly well-suited for use by organizations (as opposed to private individual use) because it's great for making highly customized but reproducible setups

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS”

2. You can very easily put these .nix files under version control and follow a convention of never leaving the system in a state where you have uncommitted changes.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

3. the troubleshooting experience is a nightmare, due to the user hostile error messages and poor/misleading/outdated/nonexistent documentation

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User”

4. NixOS keeps every previous generation — so when I discover program #12 is broken, I can nix store diff-closures to see exactly what changed

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: ClaudeOS – What if Claude Code managed your operating system?”

5. NixOS takes some of the pain away. You can experiment easily and safely, and you have a single declarative source that captures everything.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop”

6. you can literally back up a single text file describing your system setup, and you can recreate the system from it automatically in minutes

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “The Tao of Backup”

7. The difference with NixOS is that sure there are issues and preferences to work through, but when I fix them, they get committed in config

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows”

8. Ideally Nix would have better docs and a more intuitive unified config system, but LLMs have made it usable and the best solution for now.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “NixOS 25.11 released”

9. Can't imagine going back to the status quo where my system is the accumulation of terminal commands over time instead of a config file.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”

10. Machines now practically fix themselves. Especially with NixOS, as soon as the basic install runs, it gets the Nix claude-code package.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”

11. I run NixOS on everything but no way in hell am I recommending it to complete newbies to Linux who also have no programming experience.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming”

12. That's exactly why you want your infrastructure defined in version controlled files with easy revert when something gets screwed up.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus”

13. it's basically made for LLMs. Let them read the Git repo and they'll actually have a chance at figuring out the issues you have.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”

14. NixOS feels really good to use because it frees you from the uncertainty of a machine that suddenly changes underneath your feet

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows”

15. NixOS does you one thing better by giving you the option to configure things without caring about the underlying implementation

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”

16. I love NixOS and use it on my work and home machines, but I balk at seriously suggesting anyone pick that as their first choice

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Red Hat being phased out of existence?”

17. you can create proper abstraction modules that put everything together, from dependencies, to config files, firewall rules etc

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “The Polyglot NixOS”

18. I think the initial migration towards nixOS is the hardest point, since it requires learning a bunch of new things all at once

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”

19. When you need that level of control and need to scale your configuration to other machines NixOS sounds like the right choice.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”

20. I have been using Nixos for the past 5 years. And I really use the power of nix/nixos since Codex is doing good code with it.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “NixOS 26.05 Released”

21. Building declarative services on Nix is a far superior way of distributing Linux to VMs than most any other way I've tried.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Show HN: machine0 – Persistent NixOS VMs You Control from the CLI”

22. or NixOS with basic hyprland or Plasma or COSMIC config, etc., and then you can declaratively handle your dots and config.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Omacom Foundation Launches with $8M”

23. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS”

24. The hurdles are just too high for non-nix-nerds to pick it up while simultaneously trying to learn the underlying project.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Flipper One – we need your help”

25. there is rarely breakage in daily updates. If it ever happens while on the go, I can just boot into a previous generation

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues”

26. NixOS succeeds despite the indigestible Nix language because it offers what's needed to be comfortable to those who know

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User”

27. part of that is the poor documentation, and the weird situation where flakes are the de facto modern way of doing things

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark”

28. I have to learn a whole new language that's only used for NixOS just to do things I already have no difficulty doing with existing tooling.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux”

29. NixOS config errors are a nightmare because they are often a value that was computed from a value that was computed from what you wrote

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “The Polyglot NixOS”

30. I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS”

31. A pretty site for people who already know what Nix is.... which is a very very common pattern for open source projects.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS”

32. NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

33. an input-addressed (hopefully content-addressed in the future) tree of build artifacts is just a conceptually _better_ model than coarse layers of filesystem changes

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment”

34. it struck me as a super cool idea that would be incredibly useful just as soon as every other piece of software/programmer in the world converted to using it

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “One Nix flake to rule them all”

35. With Nix, this problem does not exist because all installed programs invoke all other programs not via PATH but via full absolute paths

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Start all of your commands with a comma”

36. This is important because other standard tasks besides backup (e.g. firewall, monitoring, ...) also require per-service configuration.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “NixOS is making me less afraid”

37. +1! This is immensely useful when running on hardware where builds can take a long time due to limited resources, like a Raspberry Pi.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “NixOS is making me less afraid”

38. If it's good enough for the Dutch and French governments to be adopting, it's good enough for some, but not yet all, corporate orgs

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Red Hat being phased out of existence?”

39. FW + NixOS is a potent combo that squarely satisfies the kind of configurability/overall experience I need/want in the tech I use

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I'm returning my Framework 16”

40. once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Why I love NixOS”