This was the realization I came to when I booted up a NixOS VM to start building my configuration. I recently borked my Arch install and had to start from scratch. It took me about 4 hours to get my system back where I left it — all I brought with me were my dotfiles.
I just cannot imagine I would spend less than 4 hours figuring out NixOS and its DSL. Even if I setup a fresh OS twice a year I just don’t see it being worth my effort — beyond learning a cool new OS.
Arch works well for me and I like the package ecosystem / rolling releases.
Nix’s payoff is moving to use it for dev projects as well as your base OS config. I’ve been using it instead of the standard mix of brew/bundler/nvm/etc. everyone uses to setup their development environment for React native or instead of pip/venv and couldn’t be happier: no globally installed tools with conflicting versions, just a .envrc and a shell.nix in each project. (No one else on the team uses nix this way, but, in a year or so, I’ve not run into any issues)
I just cannot imagine I would spend less than 4 hours figuring out NixOS and its DSL. Even if I setup a fresh OS twice a year I just don’t see it being worth my effort — beyond learning a cool new OS.
Arch works well for me and I like the package ecosystem / rolling releases.