Litanys

Yes, but also… It’s true. Browsers are the number one way folks get viruses.

A year and a half? Basically when hyprland got good enough. I used to use awesome and needed something with similar pretty features.

Everything is declared, from packages to configuration, and then I can put it in a git repo locked to versions. If something breaks on updates, you have free rollbacks. Which means you can’t screw up too much. Also it has almost all the software.

NixOS

Is this for real? So I shouldn’t be worried about using certain websites that they’ll track me around?

I’ve been using Nix for over a year. And have had a pretty good experience. Then in the last 2 months I’ve switched to Guix. Its definitely farther behind. But it has such a better tooling story. I really wish folks could see the potential it has and build for it rather than nix because Guix has so much going for it.

The overall experience for both is great. You get declarative configuration and easy rollback. You do need more storage but it’s not much worse than windows really.

Don’t get me wrong Guix is hard too, you’ll have to package things yourself, or use flatpak, or use distrobox or maybe nix itself just to get all the things you need. BUT if you can grasp the language and packaging guidelines, it’s much more clearly laid out. The CLI tools are clearer, the methods are too. It’s not this confusing split mess that seems to be with NixOS. And there is still not a clear plasma desktop. But I’m trying to fix that perhaps. 😁

This. The nix language makes anything bigger harder. A big nix config is just hard to wrangle.

That might be true, but WebKit anywhere other than safari performed horrible for me.

I’ve been using it for over a year and love it. A config file for your entire system, and built in rollbacks anytime something goes wrong. One language to configure everything, although in practice that doesn’t always work. But I love it.

Some others have started why it works, here is some how. Nixos completely disregards the fhs. Packages don’t install to anywhere standard, every package and configuration change gets it’s on directory in /nix/store but through smart use of tracking everything there, it symlinks all those files to proper places and sets up the environment for them to know where libraries are.

This is then also why you don’t need sudo privileges to install things. Your profile has an environment that is aware of your users packages and configurations, the system itself isn’t effected because everything is symlinked.

Then because every update means new directories in /nix/store you can role back to your last configuration because plasma broke something or whatever.

However, it’s a LOT to learn. Best place I know of is https://piped.video/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&t=0

This guy did a good job for me. Hope this helps!