I’ve been here a week ago already asking if Arch would be fine for a laptop used for university, as stability is a notable factor in that and I’m already using EndeavourOS at home, but now I’m curious about something else too - what about Arch vs NixOS?
I heard that NixOS is pretty solid, as due to the one file for your entire system format you can both copy and restore your system easily whenever, apart from your normal files and application configurations of course.
Are there any major downsides to NixOS compared to Arch apart from the Arch Wiki being a bit less relevant? I’d also lose access to the AUR, but admittedly I don’t think I’ve ever actually needed it for anything, it’s just nice to have. Also, since NixOS has both rolling release and static release and you can mix and match if you wanna get packages from unstable or not, I’m not losing Arch’s bleeding edge, which is nice.
I’d recommended Arch because with NixOS you end up having to tinker too much. Besides, if you need to use Linux for development purposes, Arch follows the usual Linux/Unix conventions, while with NixOS you would end up tinkering…And you can always use the Nix app from Arch.
Just use Arch with Gnome or KDE, that will save you a ton of time.
Huh, I never expected anyone to recommend Arch to me because you have to tinker too much with an alternative distro. I thought simplicity was the reason why people liked NixOS, no?
Comparatively, NixOS is complex, while Arch is simple. NixOS diverges very much from traditional Linux distributions, beginning with using a diferent filesystem hierarchy, which breaks a ton of apps, requiring workarounds like patches, simulating a standard filesystem… In the long run, you will have to deal with many NixOS-specific issues.
Because you’re going to Uni, it’s better to focus on having a mostly just works distro with updated repository, and that’s Arch. On your free time in the future, maybe try NixOS in a VM just so you have a feel for it. And again, you can use Nix on Arch so you use apps from Nixpkgs.
This all comes from an originally Arch user turned into an experienced NixOS user.
I have set up my archlinux os in a weekend with btrfs snapshots and everything I need. About once a quarter I tinker with it for 30 minutes to either fix a broken update or do some custom solutions to minute problems. It has been running like this for 5years. And snapshots allow me to rollback any fuckups in 1 minute.
I tried to setup nixos twice, because I love the concept. Both times I tinkered with it for 1 to 2 weeks, had to take paid leave. At the end, some stuff still didn’t work as I wanted it to. Any customization that is not already natively implemented in nix is a huge pain in the ass to add. Things that would be a 5min config edit on arch took hours on nix to make them rEpRoDuCaBLe. I have experienced no additional benefit over btrfs snapshots.
Tldr: If I could pay somebody 100$ to set up nixos just the way I want it, I’d use it. But since I have to do it in my own free time, I won’t.
Nix is a pain. Not everything works. Example Netword supposed to be able to put options in some confines. Sure most work but I have two in my config that nix well not put in. Why they are valid an I’m running them on my current Os but my nix van refuses to build with them. Another nftsble rules. Again supposed to put them in config file. But I have some nix does not like, completely valid rules but nix won’t build with them. I’ll tinker with it but it still needs work.
I’m not sure I agree with this… I’m using nix on several different generation thinkpads, two older generation MacBooks (one air and one pro), two different older generation imacs, as well as my home built PC, and an OEM built pc… All with little to no tinkering whatsoever.
All my tinkering was first setting nix up and figuring out how to use it… Then I saved and copied my config and use the same one on all the machines (albeit with subtle changes on first install).
I’ve used arch a handful of times over the years, and it is without question, significantly more “needy” over time, imo.
Guess you never had to package general or hard to package software like those that require fixed output derivation or undersupported ecosystems, trying to use common development environment for Python under NixOS, running binaries under NixOS, the list goes on.
I have not… And in fairness to me, OP didn’t mention the need for any of those things. OP mentions having not even installed anything with the AUR in Arch, which to me just means they are looking for something stable out of the box, which nix has been for me across many platforms.
Fair point, I was mostly listing the major downsides IMO that OP asked for
This is my experience as well. I went back to Arch after trying NixOS for a few weeks. I just ended up spending way too much time tinkering with the system instead of using it. Also, I feel like a major advantage to nixos is only viable if you have multiple machines. I only have a main desktop.
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Guix
+1, since for me it’s much easier to grok the language and the schema at a single glance.
Plus for those worrying about linux-libre kernel not having the right drivers for your hardware, non-guix has you covered and you can easily switch to linux-mainline. I’m really enjoying Guix a lot right now.
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Its pretty easy to update the packages yourself, just bump the version and the hash, or if needed add some missing libraries.
Because the review process is slow, sometimes it’s easier to just check the Guix Patches buglist for existing submitted patchfiles and then add them to your tree
I’m a bit surprised to see that you disagreed with the “NixOS is hard to configure” bit, but then also listed some of the reasons why it can be hard to configure as cons.
By “configure”, they probably didn’t mean just setting up say, user accounts, which is definitely easy to set up in Nix.
The problems start to arise when you want to use something that isn’t in Nixpkgs, or even something that is out of date in Nixpkgs, or using a package from Nixpkgs that then has plugins but said plugin(s) that you want aren’t in Nixpkgs.
From my experience with NixOS, I had two software packages break on me that are in Nixpkgs - one of them being critical for work, and I had no clue where to even begin trying to fix the Nixpkg derivation because of how disorganized Nix’s docs can be.
Speaking of docs inconsistencies you still have the problem of most users saying you should go with Flakes these days, but it’s still technically an experimental feature and so the docs still assume you’re not using Flakes…
I was also working on a very simple Rust script, and couldn’t get it to properly build due to some problem with the OpenSSL library that one of the dependent crates of my project used.
That was my experience with NixOS after a couple of months. The concept of Nix[OS] is fantastic, but it comes with a heavy cost depending on what you’re wanting to do. The community is also great, but even I saw someone who heavily contributes to Nixpkgs mention that a big issue is only a handful of people know how Nixpkgs is properly organized, and that they run behind on PRs / code reviews of Nixpkgs because of it.
I’d still like to try NixOS on say, a server where I could expect it to work better because everything is declarative such as docker containers - but it’s going to be a while before I try it on my PC again.
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Nix would need some proper GUI for that. It’s very “shove into cold water”, which isn’t exactly the best experience.
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The downside of NixOS is bad documentation. Which makes it take quite a while to get your config setup the way you want. Its so worth it though. I used arch for 5+ years and have been on NixOS for about 6 weeks now. I’m definitely never going back. My conifg is done, I barely have to change anything now. Its all saved in a git repo so I never have to make it again. I’ve already switched all of my machines over. And even a few of my friends. Which has been super easy to do cause I just give them my config then remove everything they don’t need. I’ve only been using it for a little while but it feels so reliable and Unbreakable even though I’m running unstable packages. Because if anything breaks you just go back to the last generation that worked. Which made me willing to just try anything when I was setting it up.
Also you could run Nix package manager on arch for this, but the nix package repo is amazing. It has everything i’ve needed or even thought about installing. And in my opinion its way better than using AUR packages. Most of the time you just DL them and don’t have to build them. Its just so much faster and more reliable then using Paru or Yay. Plus there is a NUR( nix user repo) but tbh I’ve never even looked at it.
The other con I know of is issues running binaries and app images. But there are was work arounds for them. I use a few app-images by just running 'appimage-run '. And so far its worked perfectly. As for a binaries you can use steam-run or I think using distrobox would work. But I haven’t had to do anything like that yet.
I found this YouTube channel quite useful when I was setting mine up. Vimjoyer
I found it fairly difficult to set up nixos on one of my machines, because it simply didn’t ship with a certain, relatively common kernel module/user space app. I also couldn’t find a usable workaround (only compiling my own kernel on every update, which is not exactly my kind of fun).
So, you might want to try that out first.
Out of curiosity, which one?
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Linux_kernel
You can specify custom parts of the config that enables that module and/or extra module packages.
If you specify a custom part of the config then ye sure you’ll be compiling the kernel on each kernel update but you don’t need to manually configure it
I used to like the idea of nixos because it felt “tidy” to configure everything centrally. However that tidyness is achieved by adding an extra layer which just replicates the configuration options of every program. If there is a bug in that layer or something is just not implemented, either you have to learn the whole inernals of nixos and nixpkgs, for which there is no real documentation, or you have to resort to doing things imperatively again, which is hard because of the opacity of the generated system and also defeats the whole purpose. So basically, you are completely dependent on nixos developers for things you could have easily done yourself on arch.
I have to disagree with this, with home-manager you can pretty much put just put your normal config files inside your NixOS config and map them into wherever they’re meant to go, except now they’re managed by nix
The built in config options are really nice but you don’t have to use them in the slightest as long as the package itsself is in nixpkgs
NixOS and nix in general is incredibly complicated imo and the documentation is… let’s just say sub par. I’d go with arch unless you really just wanna learn nix.
It’s incredibly complicated in the same way that ubuntu is incredibly complicated to a lifelong windows user.
It just requires a bit of a paradigm shift which includes a learning curve but IMO once you’re past that point it’s intuitive and even easier than other distros.
You cannot compare NixOS to ubuntu… even for as a new user to more adept user comparison, NixOS is really complicated. I’m not saying it’s bad, just that the documentation on how it works could be better. I’ve tried to use NixOS and nix itself multiple times and they were a nightmare to setup each time, especially NixOS (nix itself isn’t as complicated to me but it has some annoying things with proprietary software and not integrating with desktops at all without using hacky scripts).
Did you truly read what I said? The only logical way I can frame your comment is that you glanced at what I wrote down and started writing a reply.
To a regular average windows user, ubuntu is incredibly complicated. When you learm how it works and how you’re supposed to use it, it becomes incredibly easy. The “hard” part of ubuntu is the paradigm shift from windows to the linux ecosystem.
Similarly, to an average linux user nixos is “hard” because it does things completely differently from other linux distros. But once you’re used to it, it just makes sense and is easy.
So the comparison is average windows user -> ubuntu vs average linux user -> nixos. Not average user -> ubuntu vs average user -> nixos.
Finally: Nixos documentation is IMO 100x better than ubuntu documentation. Whenever I experience any issue with ubuntu it’s easier to just load up the arch wiki and hope it’s similar than it is to try and find anything specific for ubuntu that isn’t either 10 years out of date, a massive gaping security risk or just plain dumb. The nixos wiki may not be perfect but it has always been sufficient for my needs, and I have to run a decent amount of very niche pieces of software.
“Stability” is probably the most mis-used word in the Linux world.
It means that how your system looks and behaves doesn’t change, which is really important for servers, especially in business, where you want to plan any change in advance before you commit to it.
Arch is not stable in this sense. It constantly changes, and those changes can come up on short notice with any upgrade.But when people read that Arch isn’t stable, they think the system can break at any time.
I’d say this hasn’t been the case for at least 10 years now. If you RTFN (read the fucking news) and use the AUR sensibly, Arch has become a really boring system, regarding breakage.Arch breaks all the time. It has to because upstream is usually always changing so breakage is inevitable.
Though a person’s mileage on this may vary (less update frequency, less no of programs etc.), the constant thing about rolling release is that breakages within software releases are to be expected.
Arch breaks all the time.
Is that your recent personal experience?
No. Not a recent opinion. I’ve used Arch for more than 3 years now.
Ofc, Arch users should learn how to resolve a package conflict, or how to downgrade packages, or generally how to debug the system. Sometimes you also have to migrate config files.
On the other hand, as an arch user, I can tell that it mostly just works. If you customize heavily an ubuntu, it will break more likely. And while you can fix an arch, you probably have to reinstall an ubuntu.
Moreover, Arch has a testing repository which is not the default.
My experience with Arch is that it has been very solid and stable. It is just “makes sense” for the most part and so issues are very resolvable.
If you use the AUR, you can get times when packages need to be excluded ( held back ) in order for the overall system to update. I do not see that as an Arch problem and it is easy to handle.
One thing that is an Arch problem is that, if you do not update often enough, you can end-up with outdated keys that prevent you from installing before packages. The solution is just to update the keyring before updating everything else but this is confusing for a new user and kind of dumb in my opinion. I feel like the system should do this for me.
Ironically, I find Arch is most stable if you update very frequently ( which makes the updates smaller and more incremental ). I do a quick update almost every day without any fear of breaking my system. Any “problems” I have had with Arch updates are trying to update a system that has not been updated forever. Even then, it is just a bit more work.
Another thing that can happen if you leave it too long is that packages will have been replaced by newer ones. Keeping up to date means there are only going to be a small number of those. An update after a year can run into a surprising number of them.
I dug out an old laptop that had Arch on it from 3 years before. Updating it was annoying but in the end it was totally up to date and stable.
Arch is not stable but it’s easy to fix issues arising from its rolling release nature. One of the ways being utilizing the AUR package
downgradefor easy package version rollbacks. I should also note that the most common reason for Arch breaking is rarely ever because of the distro itself but because upstream has introduced breaking changes. You can see this when an upstream feature breaks in Arch, then Fedora picks up the same bug a few weeks/month later.Arch is however the most solid distro I’ve ever used since I began using Linux many many moons ago.
One thing that is an Arch problem is that, if you do not update often enough, you can end-up with outdated keys that prevent you from installing before packages. The solution is just to update the keyring before updating everything else but this is confusing for a new user and kind of dumb in my opinion. I feel like the system should do this for me.
Arch already does this. Could be that your install has the keyring refresh service disabled but I’ve had it enabled for a good while now and I’ve never encountered that outdated pacman keyring issue.
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Let me put it like this: it’s about learning curve. Arch is relatively easy to begin with, but NixOS gets much easier the more nix you learn.
What do I mean about that? Imagine having to patch something, which can be the thing. On arch you’d have to replace a package, which could lead to issues and conflicts, whereas NixOS gives you the option to keep two or even more versions of the same library, because it does not rely on your traditional UNIX path.
But with this super power comes a catch. You have to learn a programming language and learn how the nix store operates, which is a pretty high learning curve. Also, NixOS suffers from a governance issue and going by the documentation is like shooting in the dark.
That being said, the best manual for NixOS is GitHub, searching for anything and filtering by the nix language. You’ll see a ton of varying systems, be they workstations or servers.
And no matter what all the warnings say, no, flakes aren’t EXPERIMENTAL or UNSTABLE, but rather CONTENTIOUS internally. Again: I love NixOS, but they gotta fix their governance issues.
As a recent NixOS convert coming from Bazzite (Kinoite/Silverblue with user friendly daily driver and gaming tweaks), and before that mostly Arch-based distros, I’d say it boils down to the tradeoff between having way more control over reproducibility and having to deep dive into the often poorly documented domain specific rabbit hole that is Nix. If you’re comfortable with going out of your way to learn, looking for examples, reading source code to find out what options you can use or how stuff works, it can absolutely be worth it but it’s a steep price to pay for sure.
I personally adore what Nix sets out to solve and find it extremely rewarding to learn. Plus, as a developer, I enjoy puzzling out how to get stuff done and don’t mind diving into the source if I need to, so it works for me. I’d absolutely prefer solid documentation, of course, but it’s not a deal breaker.
When it comes to software, the Nix repo has a staggering amount of prebuilt binaries ready to download (which you can search here) and it’s often not too hard to hack together your own reproducible package if you want after you get comfortable enough with it. At least for my use cases, I haven’t really missed much from my days using Arch and the AUR. If anything, I appreciate how much more consistent it tends to be in comparison.
If you, like myself, go for a flake (yet another rabbit hole within a rabbit hole) based setup and point to the unstable repo, you basically get a fully reproducible, easy to update and rollback rolling release not too dissimilar to using Arch with auto btrfs snapshots enabled. That’s how I used to do Arch and it feels pretty familiar.
Anyway, that’s what I got. If you have any more specific concerns or questions I’d be happy to elaborate!
Edit: I forgot to add but I find a nice way to get comfortable without fully commiting is using Nix as a package manager on any old distro. You could install it on Endeavour (I recommend this method) and play around with Home Manager, use it as a dotfiles manager on steroids, have it declaratively install and manage the CLI apps you can’t live without and whatnot, see how you like it. That’s how I started, I have a common HM config I’ve so far used with Debian at work, Ubuntu running under WSL when I’m on Windows and now NixOS itself.
I’ve been using Arch for almost 8 years, and I enjoy basically everything about it. Since Nix has been so popular lately, I thought I’d take a look at it too. I like what it does, but the documentation is really poor, and the learning curve is insanely steep. When flakes and nix-command become stable, I’ll be giving it another shot
I too am something of an Arch user
Btw
Once I found out about Paru, I decided I would no longer need another OS outside of everything Arch provides. Also, Valve decided to switch SteamOS to Arch, so I’m sticking with it once they release it.
I use NixOS for University and would highly recommend it if you want a highly configurable system that’s declarative, however, NixOS doesn’t have great documentation for certain features and usually does things differently, so you’ll have to learn the Nix way of doing things. On the plus side, I’ve never been unable to fix my OS when it broke, you simply rollback, or if there isn’t a suitable rollback, you can plug in a live usb and set the system to use a specific commit (can’t remember the exact command for this and that’s presuming you store your config with git). Also according to these statistics nixpkgs has more packages than the AUR.
I think you just mean “declarative”. Highly configurable is literally any distro. I’d say NixOS is actually LESS configurable by design, but that is sort of the point: a repeatable image based on a template no matter what.
By highly configurable, I meant that you can configure it exactly to your needs, in the same way that you can with Arch.
You can setup your Arch with grub menu btrfs snapshots just like NixOS for convenient rollbacks. NixOS has too steep a learning curve, coming from someone who recently tried it and ended up being somewhat disappointed by it. NixOS sounds good on paper but in reality it is a long way from a mature product for desktop or general use.
As you mentioned Arch has AUR which packages just about anything and everything you could ever want in the future. And the Arch Wiki will never be “not relevant” so long as you are using Linux anywhere, the Arch Wiki is a handy reference.
NixOS sounds good on paper but in reality it is a long way from a mature product for desktop or general use.
It’s 20 years old already, will it ever be ready at this point?
NixOS’s documentation is dog. It’s not absolute dog, but it’s dog. The learning curve is brutal.
But… the (mostly) declarative management is its strongest feature. It’s very solid and you can easily unfuck you system if you haven’t done stuff like mess with partitions or delete files manually.
If NixOS had better documentation and GUI to manage the system, it would be a no-brainer, but unfortunately, it is about 5-10 years away from that. The community is very top heavy, but it’s easy to just do your own stuff.
First of all: Do you need reproductibility? I.e. having the exact same system on multiple machines? If not NixOS might be a lot more complex than what you need.
Secondly: Instability does not mean what you think it means. People read instability and think the system will break, when instability actually means your system will be updated. In the context of a server, an update can be destructive, for day-to-day users it’s very rarely so.
Finally: why Arch or Nix, why not Ubuntu, Mint, Pop or any of the other dozens of distros that are usually recommended for new users?
Going to sound like a boring pleb but… if your OS takes less than 1h to install and setup (which is my experience with Debian/Ubuntu on a SSD with a fiber connection, or even on a RPi with a modern microSD on an ADSL connection over WiFi) then it doesn’t matter much what you use. You grab a mug of coffee, click here or there from time to time and if your /home partition is saved you are good to go faster than most people even respond to an email.
I should add if you want to tinker “shallowly” containers are amazing. If you need to tinker deep, using a VM proper or even another physical machine (with a KVM or another keyboard and monitor) while your main machine remains untouched, it should NOT affect your uptime.
I think the funniest part of this is I was recently preparing some laptops for work with Windows 10 and it literally took 6 hours thanks to slow updates, one laptop corrupting the keyboard and touchpad driver so completely it required a full reinstall (on a fresh install mind you) and other impressively terrible snags. Granted it would’ve been more like 1-2 hours if I started with an install image that wasn’t about 2 years old, but it was still impressive how much of a time sink it was
