One of the great things about #NixOS is that since your entire system configuration is just sitting in a single git repo, you can pretty much just fire up Cursor and vibe code your whole environment.
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nixpkgs updates pretty quick so ai isn't always up to date but yeah it's pretty nice when it works
Nixos , how’s Dave doing ?
honest question.. ..how's this better than a bash script and dotfiles with a different distro ?
A lot of things can be managed with shell scripts, but you're going to find that you're going to have to write a lot of things to manage and merge different bits of configuration if your config gets complex enough. (especially when you're managing multiple systems with the same config) With nix, it's usually pretty good at merging different modules of config together and has plenty of tools to assist with that.
One big thing that nix does well that a bash equivalent would have to deal with is tracking what is installed to make sure it's all uninstalled properly. With nix, the programs that are "installed" are the ones listed in the config (+ dependencies) and to uninstall them you simply remove them from the config. When you rebuild and switch, they'll no longer be there. The files will still exist in the nix store (basically its cache plus more) until garbage collection cleans up what is no longer used. (for me, every 2 weeks)
Also, it's worth noting that you can do most of the user-level stuff by just using nix and home-manager. NixOS is when you want to extend that process to the whole OS.
in this setup your computer can still get into a mutated state that is corrupted/invalid with no real easy way to undo. for instance, overwritting some shared library which breaks a bunch of things.
this can't happen in nixos
Sounds like a robust setup for sure. I've successfully reverted to a previous system state using Timeshift
I've never had to *reinstall* a nixos machine. every switch to a new system state is like a fresh install.
is there a non-rolling version ?
what do you mean
oops, meant a non-rolling release version of nixos , like Debian stable releases (instead of rolling release like Arch)
there are but i don't really see why you would run them. things like signal-desktop pretty much need to be up to date on nixos-unstable all the time.
there is a lot less risk on nixos when running unstable, since you can always rollback.
right on, i should check it out sometime.. ..thanks for the info