I grew tired of the OS I used most of my life, Ubuntu. I fear updates. I used to like fixing things and tinkering, now I want my OS to just work with as few problems as possible. Is NixOS good for this, or does the happy path require me to like tinkering and fixing broken things?
You’ve definitely came to the right place then.
I’m quite tired and weary of Fedora’s updates. Even now, while I still have some computers running fedora, it’s annoying how system upgrades tend to be incompatible with certain packages or my gnome extensions.
But with NixOS, it’s pretty perfect and stable, and the best part is that it’s reproducible and somewhat immutable.
For instance, on NixOS, I was recently in a situation where I was always upgrading to the latest kernel. It got to the point where having the latest actually impacted my NVIDIA drivers as there was no support from the latest kernel. So I changed my configuration to only upgrade to kernel 6.5.x, and now everything works great! I didn’t have to run a bunch of command lines to undo system upgrades, I didn’t have to rebuild an operating system from scratch because it was too difficult for me to figure out, everything can be changed by simple configurations of a text file, and you can easily navigate to previous versions of your operating system build as NixOS holds onto different generations (until you choose to delete the old builds).
So if you want stability, I highly recommend NixOS.
The current stable version of nixos is at kernel 6.1. I intently upgraded it up to 6.5.x. I believe the newest nixOS release will be coming out on December 9th, so you could possibly wait until then to actually install NixOS.
Once you have everything configured, such as figuring out all the packages you want, and customizing all the features you want, you don’t really have to worry about anything anymore, and you can simply copy and paste these text files into your other computers if you want to rebuild an exact replica of your system.