Linux

everyone

Now that's what I'd call a stretch...

I used NixOS for a couple of years. My experience is like this:

1. It is a rolling release (mostly)
2. You write a declarative configuration for your system, e.g., my config will say I want Neovim with certain plugins, and I can also include my Neovim configuration
3. It is stable, and when it breaks it is easy to go back
4. Packages are mostly bleeding edge

It's in no way "everyone", just a vocal minority.

Here's the straightforward version of why I use it:

1. The entire state of your operating system is defined in a config file, and changes are made by changing the config file. This makes it super easy to reproduce your exact system many times and to know where all the many different configuration elements that describe your system are located.

2. Updates are applied atomically, so you don't have to worry about interrupting the update process and if it fails, the previous state of your system is still bootable. By default every time you change something, you get another option in the boot menu to roll back to.

3. Making container-like sub systems is super easy when you're familiar with nix, so you can have as many different enclaves as you like for different software versions, development environments, desktop setups, whatever without taking a performance hit. Old versions of stuff are very accessible without breaking your new stuff.

4. The package manager has a lot of software and accessing nonfree stuff is straightforward. Guix looks rad, but nix ended up being the more practical compromise for my usecase. I didn't want to have to package a heap of software the moment I made the switch.

I have been using for years on servers. My lemmy instance is hosted on it.

Although for desktop I had too many issues back in 2019 so I ended up back to Arch Linux and then EndeavourOS

Would be fun to try again to use it on desktop

I keep seeing trends with Linux distribution like teenager looking for new fashion.

I think it’s mostly the very young Linux user who hope from one distribution to the another over and over whereas many just stick with what they got : Ubuntu, Debian, mint, maybe fedora.

NixOS is certainly interesting tho.

I daily drive GNU Guix instead, and I would strongly recommend any emacs and/or lisp enthusiasts interested in the benefits of functional, reproducible, declarative, and hackable system management to give it a try!

It's insanely stable but you have to have a lot of linux/programming knowledge to do even the simplest things like installing/updating your software or making little tweaks. I played with it for hours the other day and I'm just too dumb to figure it out lol I think it's just a super stable highly customizable distro for power users and a lot of people like that. If you can get over the learning curve it's a pretty powerful and unique os

I've been using it for over a year and love it. A config file for your entire system, and built in rollbacks anytime something goes wrong. One language to configure everything, although in practice that doesn't always work. But I love it.

Some others have started why it works, here is some how. Nixos completely disregards the fhs. Packages don't install to anywhere standard, every package and configuration change gets it's on directory in /nix/store but through smart use of tracking everything there, it symlinks all those files to proper places and sets up the environment for them to know where libraries are.

This is then also why you don't need sudo privileges to install things. Your profile has an environment that is aware of your users packages and configurations, the system itself isn't effected because everything is symlinked.

Then because every update means new directories in /nix/store you can role back to your last configuration because plasma broke something or whatever.

However, it's a LOT to learn. Best place I know of is https://piped.video/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&t=0

This guy did a good job for me. Hope this helps!

Because it’s the latest Cool Nerd Thing™ like Arch before it, and Gentoo before that. Most of the people raving about it probably don’t have much use for its features.

because it's good as hell and i don't want to have to spend time having to rebuild and reconfigure fresh OS installs or risk breakage when I could just use a config file that I know already works

People love Nix because of the OS configuration based around a single config file. Essentially, you define your system configuration in this file, including installed programs, then you rebuild your system based on that configuration.

The beauty here is that you can easily move this file to another machine running NixOS and reproduce your configuration there. You can also roll back changes by simply rebooting and choosing the last known good build and you're back in business.

They're not but nixos users are REALLY loud, as in, they can't spend a single day without talking about it.

New Arch. Both still worse than Silverblue.

It's been around for like a decade, but was recently make more approachable by offering a graphical installer.

I didn't get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it's different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY