this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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I have hopped rather rarely. I think my journey started with Debian -> (all kinds of flavors of) Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS.
Maybe I missed a few (started with linux at probably ~2005). I've stayed on each of these for a few years, I think I switched between Ubuntu flavors a little bit more frequently. Stayed on Arch the longest for ~7 years. And I think I have basically settled now since 3 1/2 years on NixOS without plan to hop any further distros (unless there comes a distro comparable to NixOS that has less quirks and is generally nicer to use (e.g. tooling, strong, strict static typing etc.)).
NixOS is quite different than other distros (which IMO are all very similar) but does package-management+system-configuration basically how it should be done (in hindsight). It's a rather steep learning curve in the beginning, but it only gets better over time, since your system continuously improves, compared to different distros that accumulate dirty state over time and in one way or the other break after some time. This was often the reason why I hopped on a different distro, since I wanted a clean fresh install, which I get with something like Impermanence+tmpfs on root after each reboot.
I was going to try installing NixOs on a partition on a spare laptop, but it didn’t like the fact that the rest of the disk was btrfs. I didn’t have that much time to dedicate to figuring it out, but lack of btrfs support was disappointing.
NixOS supports Btrfs
AFAIK NixOS supports every filesystem, that other linux distros support, and often with easier/better configuration, e.g. I'm using ZFS, which seems to be easier to setup on NixOS than on most other distros.
But does it work with the installer? I couldn't get the installer to work, and saw there were other people who had problems. (thanks for the link btw. I will definitely try and give it another spin).
You mean the "new" installer GUI? I never used it TBH, I always did partitioning (and everything else) via CLI, not sure about that. But NixOS (gnome version) has GParted and all other kinds of partitioning tools on board, so just partition it as you think it's best and then generate a config via
nixos-generate-configas described in the manual. One tip, when going down that rabbit hole (when you're committing at least): Start with Nix flakes right away. Checkout all kinds of dotfiles in github of other users (and on github there are a lot of configurations that can be source of inspiration).