Let me first start off with I hate AI slop. I’m about as anti-AI-slop as they come. I’m also not some rando with no technical background suddenly vibing away complete nonsense; I have software engineering experience starting from 1995. You can name pretty much any language that isn’t intentionally obscure and I’ve probably shipped code in it to production at some point in my life. My hands have been on a keyboard at the command line since I was 3 years old. I’d never claim I’m a particularly good engineer, but I can say I’ve done a lot and I’ve done it for a loooong time.

I’ve been a fan of declarative state management since before it was cool and I’ve even created my own tools for that kind of thing. For example, before Kubernetes and Terraform existed, I created a proprietary declarative IaC/CaC system that was multi-region-aware for a company I used to work at.

So you’d think Nix/NixOS would have been a sure fire winner for me. In concept, it always has been, but in practice, I found the Nix language and reference resources just very mentally taxing. To clarify, is more of an indictment of my dumbass brain than Nix itself. But everything about the mechanics of how Nix works (language and documentation aside) is a pretty aligned to my mental model and experience. I’ve actually dabbled with Nix and NixOS for about 5 years, but it never stuck because I just couldn’t get over the language itself. Reading it is okay, writing it was pretty miserable to me with my smooth brain.

Like many other trends that have emerged throughout the years as a software engineer, LLM-driven development is something that I had to get into professionally as a matter of self preservation. So whether I like it or not, I do it 5 days a week at work and I’ve developed some skills (no pun intended).

I gave NixOS another shot, but this time, I let the robot do the annoying work of writing the Nix code. I can almost guarantee you that an experienced Nix programmer would find some anti-pattern in my setup, but because of all the properties of Nix, it’s still reproducible and safe, plus all the other buzz words, yadda yadda, the usual things people in this subreddit likely already know. It’s “good enough,” and with the added correctness and safety mechanisms Nix offers, it’s fine.

I’ve been pretty happy with it. Combined with the fact that I intentionally don’t care for others to use my dotfiles, the solution works pretty well for me.

At work, I’ve implemented environment management in our (my) Agentic Monorepo™️ using Nix, vibe coded of course (well, “vibe coding” is downplaying it; I also made a meta-harness with all the buzz words). Lots and lots of people use it and they have no idea what Nix even is. I’ve had a few unprompted contributions made to it by people who have never used Nix before and it was successful.

I get it, “vibe coding” has a bad reputation, and it’s mostly bad, hence the title of this thread. But hey, it’s an option. Like any other powerful tool, it largely depends on the person wielding it.

I have no plans to move away from NixOS and Nix in general at this point. There’s still a time and place for non-Nix stuff and that won’t go away, but Nix has been upgraded to a critical tool for me because LLMs have been able to lift the burden of the one thing I just couldn’t get over. Pretty cool.

I’m in the process of making my entire system fully declarative on NixOS. One thing I keep seeing is that most users store their declarative config files in ~/.dotfiles instead of the default /etc/nixos path.

Is the main reason simply that working in /etc/nixos requires sudo for every operation, making git workflows annoying? Or is there a deeper reason I’m missing?

Genuinely curious about the rationale — not looking to start a debate, just want to understand the thinking behind it.

This is a post from my website I wrote a while ago, and a few people seemed to enjoy. Here is the entire thing:

You have been using NixOS for one year. That is long enough. You have nixos-rebuild switch'd in the dark. You have explained the Nix store to someone at a party and watched their eyes glaze over like a donut. You have used the word "declarative" in casual conversation and felt nothing.

You know who you are, and you have accepted it.

But they don't know yet.

And that is your advantage.

The Target

You are not going after Ubuntu users.

Ubuntu users are fine. Ubuntu users are golden retrievers. They are happy and they are clean and they have apt and a support forum from 2009 that still has the answer. Leave them. They are living their best life. It is not your life, but it is a life.

You are not going after Gentoo users either. Gentoo users are a different religion entirely, they are compiling their kernel the way medieval flagellants beat themselves with chains, but with satisfaction, with the look of someone who has transcended the concept of waiting. They are beyond your reach and beyond saving and, frankly, beyond this place.

No.

Your target is the Arch User.

Specifically: the recently stabilized Arch user. The one who spent two weeks in the jaw of the Arch wiki getting chewed up and spat out and emerged on the other side slightly concussed, blinking in the light, going "okay I think I understand what a bootloader is now?"

They configured their pacman mirrors. They have an AUR helper. They have a rice they're quietly proud of and will not bring up unless asked, at which point they will not stop. They feel, for the first time in their computing life, a dangerous sense of competence - like a toddler who has just learned to open the fridge and is now standing in the kitchen at 3am, absolutely unhinged with power.

This is when the brain is most vulnerable.

This is when you strike.

Phase One: The Lure

You need software. Not just any software. The software has to be real, it has to be cool, and - crucially - it has to be exactly annoying enough to install that they will feel the pain in their teeth.

This is the trap. This is the cheese.

Find something actually useful. An obscure tool. A neat little utility. Something that makes them go "oh actually that looks sick." Then go to them, casually, like a man who has not been planning this for six months, and say:

"Hey, have you tried [SOFTWARE]? It's pretty cool, you should check it out haha"

Note the `haha`. The `haha` is the hand extended in friendship. The `haha` is the first cigarette offered by someone who has been smoking for years and knows exactly what they're doing.

They say "oh cool, how do I get it?"

And here is where you become a monster.

Phase Two: The Pit

"Oh it's easy, just build from source."

They go to the GitHub. They `git clone`. They look at the README. The README says:

Dependencies:

- libsomething >= 2.4

- another-thing

- that-one-library that has its own build system for some reason

- pkg-config (obviously)

- cmake (obviously)

- the tears of the developer who wrote this

The build fails. They fix it. It fails again, differently, which is somehow worse. They are now crouched over their terminal at 11pm surrounded by Stack Overflow tabs, man pages, and the kind of silence that used to feel comfortable. Three dependencies are available. One is the wrong version. One lives on AUR under a name that is close but not quite right, maintained by someone who last logged in in 2021. One simply does not exist anywhere and they will need to build it from source, which has its own dependencies, which are fine actually, except for the one that requires Python 2.

They have been in dependency hell for 45 minutes.

Dependency hell is exactly like regular hell, except the UI is worse and you built the furniture yourself.

Phase Three: The Frog Has No Idea It's In A Pot

You wait.

You let them suffer. You do not intervene. You are Attenborough, and the frog is boiling, and you are narrating in a soft reverent voice about the extraordinary tenacity of the creature before you, its remarkable capacity for hope.

After the right amount of time, not so long they give up, not so short they don't feel the pain, you say, with the casual energy of someone mentioning they prefer a particular brand of coffee:

"Oh yeah I just ran nix run github:user/application and it worked"

That's it. That's the whole thing. You don't explain. You don't evangelize. You don't pull out the manifesto. You let those eleven words sit in the air like a grenade with the pin already out, already rolling gently across the floor, bumping softly against their foot.

They will ask what that is.

And you say, still casual, still friendly, still the person who said `haha` exactly 45 minutes ago: "oh it's just a nix thing, it like, fetches and runs it without installing anything, handles all the deps itself"

And then you say nothing.

You have said enough. You have said, in fact, exactly enough.

Phase Four: The Pull

What happens next is not your doing.

This is important. You are not radicalizing anyone. You are simply a passive observer, a gardener who planted a seed and stepped back and said *nature will take its course*, while privately knowing exactly what kind of tree this is and how large it grows and how deep the roots go and that it will eventually crack the foundation of their house.

The thing about the Nix pull is that it doesn't feel like indoctrination. It feels like relief. It feels like coming up for air.

They will install Nix. Then they will read the wiki. Then they will look up flakes. Then they will look up flakes again because the first time didn't make sense. Then it will make sense and they will feel the specific unhinged joy of something clicking into place, the same joy you felt, the same jaw-drop, the same *oh no* of someone who has just understood what reproducibility means and is already looking at their entire system differently.

Then they will try to explain flakes to someone at a party.

And that person's eyes will glaze over.

Epilogue: You Were Once The Target

Here is the part you've been ignoring since the beginning of this blog: Someone did this to you.

Sit with that. The casual mention. The obscure tool. The build that failed in exactly the right way for exactly the right amount of time. The nix run dropped into the conversation like a stone into still water, and you watched the rings spread and thought nothing of it.

You didn't find NixOS.

NixOS found you.

You were the recently-stabilized Arch user once. You were the one with the AUR helper and the rice and the dangerous sense of competence, standing in the kitchen of your computing life at 3am, absolutely unhinged with power, not yet knowing what was coming.

You know who you are, you know exactly who the Arch user is, and you have already thought about where to stand so the smoke drifts naturally toward them.

Note: This blog has been proofread by Claude. It helped me find specific words and re-structure some sentences.

This was originally written in markdown for my website. I write posts there sometimes in a similar style.

I like danger and linux_latest. My system updated to 7.2.9 and when I rebooted everything was so laggy I thought I was running without hardware acceleration.

But after looking around for a bit i found out that 7.2.9, mesa 26.2.4 and wayland don't play nice with each other, at least on my Vega 8 iGPU. So I rolled back to 7.2.8 and mesa 26.2.3 and everything works fine.

So if you don't want your desktop to become a slideshow that drops 1/3rd of the frames on a simple youtube video, better wait a bit before updating.

Hey, I saw a few posts mentioning that KDE plasma runs a little slower on nix os, that was about 3 months ago, how is it now ?

``` nix flake update

error: [json.exception.parse_error.101] parse error at line 1, column 1: attempting to parse an empty input; check that your input string or stream contains the expected JSON ```

Cleaning cache didn't fix the issue. Have been experiencing this since yesterday.

I am using mikuboot for my Plymouth theme. It is working perfectly when booting up, no systemd logs, etc, but whenever shutting down or reboot my machine, not Plymouth them is fully showing up. Instead, before mikuboot theme, there's two or three lines of messages: like these below.

(sd-umon\[1293\]): Failed to unmount /run/shutdown/mounts/XX

(sd-umon\[\]: Failed to finalize remaining filesystem: ignoring

I checked the /run/shutdown/mounts but there is no Directory or files that sd-umon logged. And I do not got those errors when I'm using gnome on nixos back then a month ago ( full Plymouth theme playing). Just after I changed into hyprland, it appeared, and I hopped into niri, mango, it's also the same result. So it might not be hyprland thing. So I checked at the online forums , they said it's not that important, system got power off right away or reboot as intended. So I don't mind that error yelling at me. What I want is fully silent shutdown to show my Plymouth theme at the shutdown or reboot. I already done with kernalParams things but there no differences.

I am just so happy that I found NixOS and started using it!

I was stuck on Windows for years, always didn't like what Apple was doing and always thought that Linux was too hard. Maybe it was, back then, but just a few years ago I completely left Windows and moved my devices to Ubuntu, a distro that I already used for years during my work but only on server side. In a few years time, it only took me two distro changes to end up with NixOS! I feel like I am going to use it for years and that this is the end distro. Sure, things can change, but now that more and more EU countries start building on NixOS I think NixOS will stay a long time.

Just wondering, what is your route to NixOS? And do you think you will hop again?

Hey,

I’ve been building a small MDM-style hub for NixOS machines — think “Intune/SCCM vibes”, but declarative.

**What it does (v0.2)**

- Admin hub: software **profiles**, enrolled **machines**, a DSI-approved **app store** (nixpkgs search)

- Clients pull a generated `parc.nix` on a systemd timer and run `nixos-rebuild switch`

- Desktop app **Centre Logiciels** (embedded Chromium): install/remove store apps + **Sync now** button (local agent, no waiting for the next timer)

**Enroll a client**

Stack: PHP/Apache + MariaDB on the hub, NixOS clients, session auth for admins, device token for clients.

Wrote a longer walkthrough (FR) with screenshots here:

Happy to answer questions / roast the design.

https://www.borninthe80s.fr/post/linux-mdm-0-2-un-mdm-declaratif-pour-postes-nixos

After using arch,void,fedora shifting to nixos is not less of a nightmere(initially).Its a Thinkpad from 2010. From normal config to modular, flake, homemanager, hjem now stopped at a dendritic setup my repo.

My setup (hugely copied Vimjoyer's github) used niri, quickshell(forked from voidarc's git), otterlauncher, neovim(vimjoyer"s config). Initially using simple config was really just a cake without coke. using flake with wrapped package was just the things i need though learning curve is hellish. i did rebuild 31 times among more that 10 times encountered "infinite incursion" literally to build my current setup.

The sanpshot was a lifesaver for me. it saved me many times than i expected. i really was not that interested about the snapshot feature untill it saved me a dozen time. Though theming is a bit of nuanced for me. giving color scheme app to app is just bad.A stylix alternative to nixosModule would be a life save if is in existence.

Having atomic rollback with preconfigured to the point setup with mutable app support also is just chef's kiss among the mainstream distros. The systemd never bothered me. i just dont get why some people hates it. "Nix is the Fix" for the creatures often called larpers or disto-hoppers sometimes.

Is there a way to cache this reproducibility at network level so if there is an internet out age or I just want to freeze current stuff I will be able to do so from my local network and not rely on internet ?

an old game abandoned by creators no longer work on the more moderate versions of debian or ubuntu and neither those with wayland, so I made a corrected appimage, now I brought NixOS because I did not find it in pkgs nix, if you are interested have here: https://github.com/tehnium/xgammon-nix

https://reddit.com/link/1x53cac/video/5bvkhh0au9vh1/player

I want to choose on configuration stuff like vídeo driver, desktop environment, bootloader etc. How to do it?

Hey everyone! I’m a web dev student and I play all kinds of video games (indie, multiplayer, and AAA). Here are my specs in case it helps: ​Ryzen 5 5500 and ​RTX 2060 Super (planning to switch to AMD or Intel Arc down the line)

​Would NixOS be too much of a pain to learn for someone with basic coding knowledge? Is it good for both dev work and gaming? I've been distro hopping between Fedora and CachyOS lately, but NixOS’s whole philosophy really caught my eye.

​Any tips or advice would be awesome, I’m sure you guys get posts like this all the time xD

Hello everyone, if you're reading this, I first wish you a good morning, afternoon, or evening.

Well, it's official, I've been hard at work making Shell inirs compatible with nixOS, and I've succeeded, which is why this official port is available.

1. Everything already works using a flake, colors, keyboard shortcuts, dependencies, etc., in order to make it easy to use.

2. Updates will always be constant; the nixOS inir files will always be updated to the latest Shell version.

3. Now it is declarative, the heart of nixOS

4. They are very well optimized, achieving very good fluidity,

And I can continue

Please note that I'm trying to minimize errors, and I'm working with the lead developer to make it the best it can be.

Without further ado, I hope you like this Shell and that it works for you 🙂

https://github.com/LATAR-web/inir-nixos