I’ve been using Nix and NixOS for 4 years now. While I like using it for my PCs and tried using it for servers with success, I think its ecosystem still is immature for development and production purposes, and thus my passion for Nix has faded.
So my question is what keeps you using Nix or NixOS? How have you been using it? Do you still feel passion and hype for it?
a sort of one-man network effect?
i wanted to load books onto my e-reader (runs NixOS) wirelessly: i already have a media server which i use for TV (Jellyfin). the e-reader speaks NFS, so i enabled NFS on my media server, added the auth to the e-reader’s Nix config, and since all my NixOS devices use the same repo for their config, my laptop and PC both get that NFS setup “for free”. incrementally, that makes everything else easier: i have a MAME arcade cabinet in the other room running Arch. if it had been running NixOS instead, suddenly that task of “load books onto my e-reader wirelessly” would have also solved the issue of “load games onto my MAME cabinet wirelessly”.
once you get going it’s just so easy to keep building incrementally. “tech debt” is a bit less of a thing than with other distros (still a thing, just smaller) because of determinism and
nix flake checkand so on. honestly once i care enough about not being able to load games onto that MAME cabinet easily, i’ll solve that by flashing it with Nix, and so grows my network effect.