NixOS long-term experience and usability
I've been using Fedora for a quite long time now. However, I recently started thinking seriously of transitioning to NixOS as my new daily driver and ditching the former one
My work involves:
- Software development across countless languages and ecosystems (Go, Rust, C/C++, Python, Node.js, etc ...)
- Machine Learning (Pytorch/tf with CUDA, NumPy and other python libraries managed via pip/uv)
image & video editing (mainly GIMP + Kdenlive)
- VM experiments
- Build, deployment, CI/CD and monitoring (CMake, Docker, Kubernetes, etc ...)
Even if Fedora and other similar distros handle this seamlessly. Nevertheless, I like how NixOS introduces generations and declarative configs for robust and reproducible systems so I could upload flakes and config files anywhere, clone and build them easily to setup any machine almost instantly instead of spending hours looking for packages, or even recover from failures
But also want to know what are the downsides and frictions caused by:
- NixOS non-FHS model and how it packages software differently
- Running shell scripts, binaries, shared object libraries, AppImages, flatpaks, etc ...
So I wanted to hear full experiences here despite already doing prior research