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"plaintext": "Towards the end of last year I mentioned that I had given NixOS another try because 5th times the charm, right? "
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"plaintext": "This time, not on my personal computer but rather on a Server for self-hosting purposes. Since then, this OS really grew on me and I am now running NixOS on all my laptops. No regrets."
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"plaintext": "The two main selling points that make NixOS so incredible to me are"
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"plaintext": "That second point especially, for a long while I was scared to run Arch Linux as I had heard so many stories about people updating their system and nothing would work anymore. With NixOS that literally cannot happen. When you rebuild your configuration, be it because you added a new tool or you updated some software, if the system fails to boot you can always go back your previous working configuration. So the learning curve of NixOS may be steep but it's really like playing Dark Souls in that you always get to re-spawn and try again until you have figured out how to do it right."
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"plaintext": "Nix is accidentally the best for AI"
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"plaintext": "my entire system is now described in a single folder containing a bunch of .nix files, which means I can just let any AI agent run inside this folder, describe my problem and the likelihood of it being able to find and resolve the issue is surprisingly high."
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"plaintext": "On top of that, if it does end up doing something stupid I can always boot into the last working version of my configuration and it's as if nothing ever happened. Therefore the risk of letting AI agents make arbitrary changes on your system configuration is much lower than on any other system."
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"plaintext": "I'm saying that this accidental as many loud voices in the NixOS community are still strongly opposed to any usage or mention of AI. Personally I am still trying to understand all the changes it makes and asking back and forth about why things are done in a certain way has rather accelerated my journey into nix & NixOS."
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"plaintext": "Nix feels good"
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"plaintext": "There is something about my entire system configuration living in one place that I can manage via git and easily share with others just feels great. Maybe this is me being a bit odd."
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"plaintext": "What's next?"
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"plaintext": "Currently my nix configuration is basically 3 files"
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"plaintext": "The last one of which is growing out of control. So I want to adopt a more modular setup soon, most likely that will be using the Dendritic Pattern. I have also been really enjoying devenv recently and might share some more on that as well."
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"path": "/a/3mjflmmujup23-commiting-to-the-nixos-rabbithole",
"publishedAt": "2026-05-11T18:11:14+00:00",
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"textContent": "Towards the end of last year I mentioned that I had given NixOS another try because 5th times the charm, right? \nThis time, not on my personal computer but rather on a Server for self-hosting purposes. Since then, this OS really grew on me and I am now running NixOS on all my laptops. No regrets.\nThe two main selling points that make NixOS so incredible to me are\n- The whole system is defined decoratively\n- You can always restore the last working state\n\nThat second point especially, for a long while I was scared to run Arch Linux as I had heard so many stories about people updating their system and nothing would work anymore. With NixOS that literally cannot happen. When you rebuild your configuration, be it because you added a new tool or you updated some software, if the system fails to boot you can always go back your previous working configuration. So the learning curve of NixOS may be steep but it's really like playing Dark Souls in that you always get to re-spawn and try again until you have figured out how to do it right.\nNix is accidentally the best for AI\nmy entire system is now described in a single folder containing a bunch of .nix files, which means I can just let any AI agent run inside this folder, describe my problem and the likelihood of it being able to find and resolve the issue is surprisingly high.\nOn top of that, if it does end up doing something stupid I can always boot into the last working version of my configuration and it's as if nothing ever happened. Therefore the risk of letting AI agents make arbitrary changes on your system configuration is much lower than on any other system.\nI'm saying that this accidental as many loud voices in the NixOS community are still strongly opposed to any usage or mention of AI. Personally I am still trying to understand all the changes it makes and asking back and forth about why things are done in a certain way has rather accelerated my journey into nix & NixOS.\nNix feels good\nThere is something about my entire system configuration living in one place that I can manage via git and easily share with others just feels great. Maybe this is me being a bit odd.\nWhat's next?\nCurrently my nix configuration is basically 3 files\n- flake.nix\n- hardware.nix\n- configuration.nix\n\nThe last one of which is growing out of control. So I want to adopt a more modular setup soon, most likely that will be using the Dendritic Pattern. I have also been really enjoying devenv recently and might share some more on that as well.",
"title": "Commiting to the NixOS rabbithole"
}