NixOS

Reader supplied reviews for NixOS Average rating 9.0 from 118 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: -- unstable26.0525.1125.0524.1124.0523.1123.0522.1122.0521.1121.0520.0920.0319.0919.0318.0917.0916.0916.0315.09.101214.12.88514.04.63013.10.35728 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: 26.05 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-06-11 Country: Germany Votes: 0 This is the endgame distro. Makes everything else look simply wrong. Immutability makes a lot of sense and solves problems that other distros tried, and failed to solve (looking at you suse Aeon). Flatpak is a kludge compared to the scripted beauty of nix configurations. Well, calling nix a beauty is perhaps poetic license: as a language, I've seem better, much better. And any rewrite to provide for example better error messages has proven hard. Yet the idea is so ahead of its time that I suspect it will stick, in a few years we will have accepted the complexity as a small price to pay for the power gained over your os. Like it happened with git. When it first came about, even google engineers thought it was too complicated. Yet today everyone uses it, even to manage text notes. Nix packages can exist in 'retro' OSs like OSX and windows, or any other linux flavor. This i a big win for adoption, you can try it without reinstalling your OS. I suspect even enterprise guys will consider it now that nvidia has declared they will provide first-class support for nix Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2026-06-09 Country: Denmark Votes: 1 NixOS is the endgame of Linux distributions. I've been daily driving it on multiple devices for over 2 years now and I haven't ever once thought about looking back. Legacy distributions like Arch Linux or Gentoo don't compare to the level of sanity. Sure, you can technically run anything you do on NixOS on all of those distributions, but when you eventually have to either upgrade or change some aspect of your configuration you'll need to dig into some arbitrary file and change some value or whatever. It makes changing behavior much more of a chore than it needs to be. A NixOS configuration in version control systems like Git make rolling back bad changes a breeze. On NixOS you get the largest package repository on the entire planet. You can turn it into anything you want, and deploy it anywhere you want. Sharing configs has never been easier. Even if you somehow manage to break something you can easily rollback to an earlier generation and everything will be as if nothing ever happened! 10/10 would highly recommend. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 9 Date: 2026-05-06 Country: Hungary Votes: 7 NixOS is utterly brilliant and deranged at the same time. It's immutable, atomic, reproducible, declarative, and even rolling release, if you use the unstable branch. The nix syntax is ugly, there are multiple schools of thought about how to set up your config. Flakes! Home managers! Dendritic patterns! So many buzzwords, and who knows what the next scary new shiny thing will be next week... The learning curve is steep. At first I thought the whole declarative-immutable approach was rigid, but I realized it's quite the opposite. You have to think about what belongs on which layer of your system. Once you wrap your head around it and figure out your config, NixOS sings. It's stable as unlike anything in the distrosphere. No partial or messed up updates. If one thing fails, the entire process fails. In case you did something stupid, you can rollback to your previous image. If you want to replicate the exact state of your computer for re-installation or duplication, you push your config files to git, pull them, and rebuild from that. And because every time you update your config is rebuilt, there is no config drift. The nix package library is huge, laughing AUR in its face. The community is vibrant, helpful, committed, and delightfully weird. Of course rollbacks and the nix store come with a hunger for disk space, so occasional garbage collection and link optimization is recommended. I have an alias in my shell that does all of that along with an update. It's neatly declared in my home manager nix. Another thing worth noting, is that some imperative configurations might disappear when the system is rebuilt and some packages might lack certain configuration options, so you can't set them in a declarative way. The usual directory structure is also not present thanks to the way the nix store works with its hashes and multiple versions for the same package. I tested NixOS several times on VM before I took the plunge, and it ended up being one of my favourite distros. It dares to be different, but isn't different only for the sake of it. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 118 reader reviews of NixOS...