I've been using it on all my personal devices for ~6 months and also for some bare metal sever deployments.
A (mostly) immutable system configured with a single config file is an absolute killer feature.
The ability to roll back to a previous config in the bootloader or the terminal is brilliant.
And home-manager [1] provides the same experience for your user environment.
I also looked into Guix, but the community and package repository seem much smaller.
They also don't accept proprietary software in the official package repo. Which is a respectable ideological choice, but really reduces usability a lot compared to nixpkgs.
I’m on NixOS and had the same feeling when first debated which to use.
If I was running some security sensitive app or scientific computing I would probably choose guix and they tend to be pretty rigid about reproducible building from source and signing changes to to the OS. But my day to day OS I use NixOS as I get tons of packages and basically all the same features with the trade-off of expecting some weird behavior on edge-cases and reproducibility (which I have yet to run into but know I will eventually)
> I tried to install NIX, but the graphical installer wouldn't boot.
I've had the same issue. Nix uses KDE Plasma by default, which uses a compositor that struggles with some video drivers.
Fortunately, installing from command line is practically the same, especially if you do your partitioning beforehand.
> Then when I tried the text-based install, it couldn't see my NVME disk.
That's a more unique problem. I'm not sure what to do about it either. Did /dev/nvme0n1 just never populate? My best guess is that you booted emulated BIOS instead of UEFI.
I gave NixOS a serious try... the reason I gave it up was that pretty much all build systems for my own projects were broken and it was a pain to "nixify" them.
I've been using it on all my personal devices for ~6 months and also for some bare metal sever deployments.
A (mostly) immutable system configured with a single config file is an absolute killer feature.
The ability to roll back to a previous config in the bootloader or the terminal is brilliant.
And home-manager [1] provides the same experience for your user environment.
I also looked into Guix, but the community and package repository seem much smaller.
They also don't accept proprietary software in the official package repo. Which is a respectable ideological choice, but really reduces usability a lot compared to nixpkgs.
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager