NixOS

Reader supplied reviews for NixOS Average rating 9.1 from 98 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on NixOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- unstable25.1125.0524.1124.0523.1123.0522.1122.0521.1121.0520.0920.0319.0919.0318.0917.0916.0916.0315.09.101214.12.88514.04.63013.10.35728 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: unstable Rating: 4 Date: 2025-12-08 Votes: 0 Nixos is a cool idea done terribly thats it, thats the tldr but for a longer text: nixos is an amazing idea done in an infuriating way that makes pretty much all its neat cool or good features not worth it. To do basically anything on nixos you have to do it the nix way, there is no quick fix, no quick cargo install, no, you will do it the nix way. Breaking with the Posix filesystem standard makes anything else impossible. Oh you want to install a quick litte tool that you found on the web? nope, sorry, you either have to package it, write a dev shell for it or just give up. i got to the point that it was often faster to just download the windows versions of tools and running them through proton than to try and find a way to do it the nix way. The community is really what kills it tho, with some features like flakes still not stable after years of them even being recommended to beginners. i somewhat hope that guix gets big, but to be real, it never will. Maybe some other big company will fork it or make their own version and some day we will have the fedora of declarative distros but until then im going back to gentoo. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 25.05 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-12 Votes: 2 I use NixOs on my main personal machine, two servers and a few other devices around the house because I can have a central configuration that is published on a git server and allows easy, repeatable and recoverable deployments. The peace of mind it gives, that when a SD card from a rpi dies, a new one, with the exact same state, is created in seconds, really is it's main selling point for me. Learning the Nix language (that is powering it's configuration) is relativly easy once you get the hang of it. Nix flakes provide ultimate flexibility without adding much complexity. The stable releases are really stable, I haven't had any isses so far with crashes, bluescreens or unfixable errors. Only downside is, using binary released software can be a bit of a hurdle and cross compiling software for other OS's requires you to also jump a few hoops, but nothing too hard. I'd say if you're looking for a reliable and most importantly clear configured system, NixOS is your choice! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-01 Votes: 5 Finally I can use latest packages without relying on Flatpaks and not worrying about my os breaking or running into dependency hell. If something breaks I just rollback to last working snapshot and go along with my day. No more overnight fixing and reinstallations. NixOS is such a amazing and unique distro. It really changed the way I use computers. The learning experience could be painful tho and documentation is still so so. However things are getting better. Hopefully it gets more traction and we get more users who contribute upstream. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 98 reader reviews of NixOS...