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That escalated quickly...
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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Can you imagine taking someone from MacOS and giving them NixOS?
user: Great, June 2026, Upgrade time! What do I click on?
NixFriend: Umm, sorry you're going to need to open your terminal and change your nix-channels to https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.06 and you're going to need to do it under sudo.
user: umm, ok, now i'm upgraded?
NixFriend: no, not quite, you need nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
user: ohh jeeze, ok. umm, i got an error, a couple hundred lines it's kind of vague about a bunch of functions failing
NixFriend: Go back up 70-80 lines and see if it calls out a certain package being a problem, just ignore all the messages about variables not being set.
user: ohh wow, yeah, ok, something about pinentry and specifying ncurses and some messages about name deprecation
NixFriend: ohh yeah ok, that's pretty easy, go edit these text files, change all the names if mentions and either remove pinentry or just make or leave in pinentry-ncurses
user: Ohh ok; Now it's complaing that /boot is full
How'd your 25.11 channel migration go, fellow Nix-enjoyer?
Second-best ever. 25.05 was seamless.
I only needed to screw with mesa, pinentry, vim-full, and unpin my kernel for v4l which is now fixed in OBS
I'm preparing to break out my configurations so that all my machines can share parts of them and maybe see if I can get my home .confgs a little more managed under home manager.
How was yours?
Wow, thank you for this comment! I was pondering maybe setting up a trial for NixOS at work, but now I see we just don't have the manpower to handle that.
Nope. I was thinking of doing an immutable server with it because that would be neat AF.
But the updates are deprecated way too soon. You really need to take the latest milestones really close to when they happen.
I run it myself at work for a couple of years now, but I wouldn't want to support the userland on it, even the technically competent ones.
This is real sad news. I was hoping it would allow for a "Intune-like" experience for people, where they'd just download the configs dynamically as needed.
give em time, given they're not young by any standard, but they are starting to gain traction which should help bring about advances.
lol yeah Nix is definitely not for everyone, but an insane flexible tool when you know how to use it.
My favorite part is syncing one file and my home folder and moving from one computer to another seamlessly.
I've moved hardware three times and always been right back in service.
I tried NixOS for a solid month, didn't click for me, so now I'm on gentoo. I'll have to try it again someday.
Don't worry. I tried it for about 2 years and didn't quite get the hang of it. Back on Arch now. NixOS really has a steep learning curve and not nearly enough documentation.
I absolutely adore doing shell.nix environments and flakes. I basically don't have anything installed that I don't need on a daily basis. I use syncthing to keep a folder full of shell environments backed up.
cd /nixShells/video nix-shell
BOOM, I have yt-dlp, ffmpeg-full, mpv, timg, kdenlive, python 3.12 with a bunch of subrip and AI subtitle generators. I do what is needed and exit and it's all gone.
I keep one for wine, one for mp3, one for parsec, one for video
Then I have flakes for real development work.
admittedly, it's a lot :)
If you want to explore other immutable and declarative OSes – as well –, you could take Guix for a spin, too (and you can install things such as proprietary software with the NonGuix software repository, in case that's a concern any).