NixOS is weird... I love it (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 hours ago by cujo@sh.itjust.works to c/nix@programming.dev

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Hello, everyone! I'm a long time Linux user who has warily stared at NixOS from the safe distance one might give to wild animals on a safari for quite some time now... And I finally decided, "fuck it, I'm gonna poke it with a stick."

I absolutely adore this system, even as strange a paradigm as it is coming from a decade of "traditional" management systems. I haven't been this excited about a Linux distro since... Well, ever really. Maybe OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? I can't recall.

Anyway, I wanted to introduce myself and preach to the choir for a second, so to speak. As someone totally new to this paradigm of system management, what are your #1 must read/watch resources you would recommend? I've perused through the NixOS Learn website over the last couple of days, and I'm itching for more. I can't wait to see what all this system is capable of!

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[-] monk@social.unboiled.info 3 points 8 hours ago

@cujo

#1 is definitely skimming the original https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
#2 is bookmarking https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p and going poking
#3 the holy trinity of nix/nixpkgs/nixos manuals at https://nixos.org/learn which are also the reference kind of materials, not top-to-bottom bedside reading

Some swear by Nix pills https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills, but I only got to reading the relevant parts of them when I was making my own distro.

In general, poking matters much more because NixOS world is much more Lego than the now-fossilized last-century Linux one, meaning that you get much more freedom/incentive to do weird things that noone tried before, so there are fewer restrictive patterns you need to learn before you inevitably break them. If you think I've just described Windows->Linux, no, I'm describing Linux->NixOS.

this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025

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