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Why I'm Leaving NixOS After a Year?
2025-08-03 Around a year ago, I published a blog post explaining my overall experience Switching from Arch to NixOS. You can read it if you’re interested in my early experiences, but, to give you a spoiler, that post ends with me saying: Unfortunately, though, I don’t think the benefits I’ve gotten in this one month of using NixOS so far justified the cost I’ve initially spent and continue to spend learning Nix and NixOS.
In NixOS (or home-manager), you now write a DSL based on Nix expressions, which then generates the actual configuration file the program will use. It’s similar to how Rich Hickey made Clojure run on the JVM and JavaScript runtimes to take advantage of their tooling and ecosystems, despite sharing very little with them in terms of philosophy. I don’t need reproducibility to the extent that NixOS provides, and I also realized that I’m way more comfortable getting things done in an impure system than dealing with the friction of a pure one that slows me down in almost in every change I do.
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