Less work than managing your own neovim setup

now I want my OS to just work with as few problems as possible.

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.

I fear updates

It is better to reinstall Ubuntu than to perform a system update.

Honestly.

What do you mean by “personal customization”? Rising, flashy colors and rounded window corners? On the NixOS website there is a collection of ready-made configurations for every taste.

If you set up the OS for work, the first time it will take a week. Subsequently, you just need to copy the configuration file to the appropriate directory and rebuild.

Yes, NixOS is almost impossible to break. And yes, it just works.

For me it was a big upfront time investment. I managed to get nixos installed and my programs mostly configured, and then along the way I learned more and realized my prior setup was somewhat dumb so I refactored it. This process has happened at least 4 times. But now I feel like I get it, and can update and configure all of my machines from my one laptop, using one repo of flakes.

I enjoyed learning nix/nixos in stages like that, otherwise I don’t think it would have clicked. I’m pretty sure I’m going to repeat the same process a few more times as I’m by no means yet a nix expert.

While I’m not tinkering with my setup, I absolutely love how I can install and try new projects easily, including getting a working dev environment going painlessly for almost any stack.