Well I didn’t expect to be writing this post, ever.
Most of my posts on here have just been NixOS and praising its glory to all but recently I have been greatly disliking NixOS more and more.
But what does this mean for you? It could mean nothing, or it could mean everything…
NixOS Pros
I can’t say NixOS isn’t great, it has so many amazingly useful features that just make using Linux so much easier.
- All packages are version locked. (Easy to roll back versions)
- All package dependencies are per package so version conflicts are prevented.
- Thousands of services are now easily configurable from the ground up thanks to NixOS Options.
- It provides a similar format to docker in that your whole system is a container that can be perfectly and precisely replicated anywhere!
These have been the reasons I stuck with NixOS for the past year.
But the way NixOS does some of these things has also been its downfall for me.
NixOS Cons
The greatest problem I have experienced with NixOS is actually development.
Working with anything that requires external libraries like C, Java or even Rust has been so much of a pain I have just given up on projects because of it.
But what is the problem exactly?
NixOS makes it very difficult to simply, install a library and have it accessible to the rest of your system.
On Arch setting up a OpenGL environment for C is as easy as:
sudo pacman -S gcc cmake make glfw glew libglv
On NixOS you can’t just add these packages to your package list and call it a day, you need to setup whatever LD_LIBRARY_PATHs are and even then I couldn’t get it to work.
It turns a simple idea of, “Hey I’m going to have a crack at some C and write a OpenGL program”, to, “I literally don’t understand how to even get this setup, at this point I haven’t even wrote any code and I’m burnt out”.
I got so fed up I started looking into switching Distro’s entirely.
“Where did that lead you, back to me” – Arch Linux”
Arch, dangerous but simple
Now don’t worry I’m not actually abandoning NixOS. But I will be using an Arch Virtual Machine to do any kind of graphics or library dependent development.
Thanks to my guide on installing Arch is was really easy to setup and like I illustrated earlier it took my around 30 seconds to get my environment ready and I could just start coding, wonderful!
Arch does make it slightly more tedious to setup the actual operating system, but its a sacrifice I can make for being able to quickly spin up any development environment I want.
Conclusion
Arch makes the operating system tedious, but the development environment easy.
NixOS makes the operating system easy, but the development environment torture.
It really seems like there is no perfect Linux distribution. Not yet at least.
Until next time, thank for tuning in.
Jasper out.
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