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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
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.
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).
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.