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That Computer Scientist - Nix is the New Arch!
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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So how useful it is in practice?
How do updates work?
Can it play Crysis?
I've been on nix for only 2-3 days so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think it's pretty useful. Back in Arch/EOS, I always find ways to mess up the system (I switched to Nix because of a failed system update on EOS). On Nix, it's so easy to roll back and you don't even need to use the terminal.
There are (afaik) 3 channels you can choose: stable, unstable, and small(?). I'm staying on stable for now. Package manager is slower than pacman, imo, and it's not as straightforward as Arch. Some programs (like kde connect) need to have service enabled in config.
It can replace the need for docker.
Replit.com uses it for its VM environments. See: https://blog.replit.com/nix
Yes
It's useful for quite a few things in practise:
This video shows off some of the cool things you can do with nix: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Le0IbPRzOE&feature=share9
You update a programming by specifying the latest version of a program in config and rebuilding.
You update the OS by pointing to the channel you want to use and rebuilding.
You can time travel back to a previous state if anything goes wrong.
I expect so, some people.do use nix for gaming.
never had that issue before, as long as they have the same version and config
I have those on Gentoo sometimes, possibly because I overloaded USE too much, but that's not something I have to deal with on Debian/Mint.
wasn't that possible before with snapshotting (btrfs/lvm)?
If it allowed me to avoid systemd, I would be willing to give it a go. Perhaps I will try it in a VM, but it's not going on any baremetal for now.
Then you are very lucky. "It worked on my machine" is a meme for a reason.
I haven't used snapshotting with those before. I guess the difference is that with nix it is done by the package manager by default, with btrfs/lvm you would have to set that up independently (please correct of this is not the case).