NixOS

Reader supplied reviews for NixOS Average rating 9.0 from 122 review(s) 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: 2026-08-23 Country: United States Votes: 9 Nixos is not 'another distro'. It is not the same product category as say debian or fedora. Changes can take real time to get right, but then are completely reproducible and their state can be restored at any time in the future immediately. It's a trade off, not a right / wrong answer thing. For me the reproducibility is absolutely worth the cost, and my machines have basically become disposable; state can be reproduced completely from my flake. I have been using nixos for about 2 years now. It has changed how I manage all of my machines, and I am basically fully committed to it for all my systems. I am using it on all my end user devices and vms. I generate and remotely install images for proxmox, hyperv and aws, and push config updates to end-user machines and servers, all using nix-native (or community supported) tools. All completely reproducible, declarative, all managed with a small git-aware text configuration. Absolutely amazing. It's the promised land. The cost of admission is considerable though. I don't know if I recommend this os to anyone. If you look at nixos and become overjoyed at the idea of a fully declarative os, then you MIGHT be able to get through the pain points, but otherwise you might want to look at just using nix (the package manager) on another distro. There are a few escape hatches that really help if you need packages that are unavailable (distrobox, nix-shell, docker etc), but I have had one or two things that were just easier in a vm. There is excellent, complete, and up-to-date reference documentation, but the overall 'getting started' material is wanting. This is a system that you will have to want to learn, and if you don't see huge value in it, I would say skip it. However, the effort:reward ratio scales with the number of machines you are going to manage; dumping hours into getting some system config right is kind of silly for one laptop, but that state is now portable to any machine now or at any time in the future. My fleet is large enough that host disposability / reproducibility pays for itself. Software isolation is nix's forte, and so nixos gets brought in the software dev discussion. Nixos is naturally pretty good at this, but it's not a silver bullet. I honestly use regular docker and dev containers more for this purpose in my projects than plain nix-shells. TL;DR - If you want declarative, reproducible, dependency-hell-free packages DON'T use nixos. Use the nix package manager. If you want that AND a declarative, reproducible, immutable OS (which is a pain in the butt a lot of the time), AND are willing to put in some serious time to get a full-featured flake working the way you want, then welcome to your new cult! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 25.05 Rating: 5 Date: 2026-08-07 Country: Canada Votes: 1 I used this distro from 2016 to 2025, but I eventually switched back to the distro I used before NixOS. The benefits are all there: a functional declaration of a system managed entirely in a git repo, fully reproducible, and theoretically highly customizable. However, the downsides are also real - the single significant one for me is that it's an eternal time sink. People usually claim that the cost is front-loaded, but it was untrue for me. Because of the flexibility offered by Nix, and the high volume of improvements made to Nixpkgs under this flexibility, I had to spend time every now and then adjusting my customizations to make my system spec installable after updating Nixpkgs' git hash. NixOS also forced me to allocate extra time to set up development repos. Once it's right, flake.nix can greatly reduce the effort to bootstrap a fresh development environment. However, the cost to make it right and keep it right in the long run is nontrivial. In particular, I chose micromamba to avoid the burden of writing definitions for packages missing in nixpkgs for my Python project, but that practice ironically defeated the initial reason to work on NixOS (or Nix). Modern tools for Python, such as uv, have their own mechanisms to lock down a reproducible environment, at least for the Python part, which overlaps with what Nix(OS) offers. The last straw was the inability to do remote development using the JetBrains IDE installed on NixOS. The IDE copied its files to the remote host but failed to start an instance there because the binaries were modified. I didn't want to spend another few days removing that blocker; the priority was the project's material progress, not fixing an issue that was trivial on other distros, so I just switched. This was before I adopted AI agents, though, so I have no idea how they help in reducing the maintenance cost these days. Nonetheless, NixOS costs the most precious nonrenewable resource of every human being - namely time - which I take as unacceptable. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2026-07-20 Country: The Netherlands Votes: 16 The final distro, all other distro's feel like they're missing something after using nixOS. I've used debian, rocky linux, mint previously but after trying nixOS I couldn't go back to any of those. My raspbery pi still runs raspberry pi OS and each time I need to update something or install a package I just get the itching feeling of wanting to have a better overview of what's going on. If it ever breaks I'll lose everything, if I need a package I just install it but where does it go? with nixOS I always have everything in the palm of my hands and automatically documented by code. It's amazing. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 122 reader reviews of NixOS...