I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I’m happy with it so far.

Why did I switch?

  1. Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it’ll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.

  2. Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it’s around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.

Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?

  1. Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.

  2. Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It’s harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn’t a big issue for me most of the time.)

For now, I’ll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.

My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it’s probably not suitable for most.

  • mrh@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    edit: I do feel norawibb’s point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      🎉 Same! I’ve been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.

      • mrh@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS’s, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.

        • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.

          • dino@discuss.tchncs.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Can you give an example in what kind of scenario you would want “identical servers”? In my head that is where tools like ansible come into play…?

            • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.

              Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.

            • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The great thing about Nix is that it achieves reproducibility with the package manager. Container and Ansible depend on taking a system and documenting steps to bring it to the desired state. This state then might deviate over time (e.g. crashing while updating).

              But yes, for most practical use it probably doesn’t make much of a difference. For me Nix forces me to document what I’m doing, which I might not do for “quick and simple change” on other systems.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I’m forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.

        • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          That’s right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)

          It’s definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)

      • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it’s new and an independent distro. I’ll try the other two some day.

  • Nora@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Yeah there’s a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.

      In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a “fresh install” on every reboot.

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlM
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    You might be interested in trying Gentoo, which is what I use. The package manager is definitely not fast, but it is very powerful. You get a lot of NixOS-like powers, but it integrates seamlessly into the unix eco-system without NixOS’ overhead or its unorthodox approach that causes trouble sometimes. It also has first class support for compiler optimizations and global management of compile flags for packages.

    So yeah, updates will not be fast at all, but the rest I think you’ll enjoy.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I’m afraid it’ll compile for many days 😅

        • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          A laptop with 8 GB of ram and 6 cores. I have only one machine that I use for work. That’s the main issueI. Need to find a free weekend to compile and try out gentoo 😅

          • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlM
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’d say your laptop is an ideal candidate for gentoo, especially if it’s at most 5 or so years old (it must then have hyper threading, so 12 virtual cores). It has just enough resources to compile packages with decent speed, but enough restriction that gentoo’s performance boost and optimizations will make a noticeable difference.

            I actually have a laptop with the same resources as yours. Your compile times will not be as bad as you expect. Just make sure to use binary packages for big stuff, like browsers, the kernel, office suite, etc.

            • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              That’s quite convincing :) I’ve been meaning to try gentoo for many years actually. I’ll install it soon and report back!

    • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlM
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      fwiw I really like nixOS. I like its ambitious approach. But I think it’s unorthodox approach is bound to cause issues. Most software has FHS and a typical Linux system in mind, and while nix solves those problems for most of them, there will always be something weird there.

  • Drito@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.

      • Drito@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        One year approximatively. But I elaborate a bit, I installed the minimal version, because I use bspwm. I had issues since the tty log in. Probably the xfce iso is OK.

    • nik282000@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      VM. Always practice new systems in a VM. Took me half a dozen tries to get a fuckup-free Void install in a VM but only one on the actual hardware.

  • Euphoma@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It’s just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.

      • senkora@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Does Nix have Guix-style grafts? I know that in theory that is how Guix lessens the minor-update-to-core dependency problem. But I only use Guix for dev environments so I don’t know how well it works in practice.

  • iopq@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies

    • monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      That really depends on what kind of computer you are using and how fast your internet connection is. Also a desktop computer should be (for most people) as little maintanance work as possible and having long update/install times really stands in the way of that.

      • iopq@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Why? If it’s installing singing in the background it’s not stopping me from doing my work

  • featherfurl@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I also haven’t noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.

    I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven’t really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it’s hard to say.

    I’d definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.

    ( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Thank you that makes sense. When I get my hands on a more powerful machine and have less data constraints, I’ll try Nixos again. I do miss it sometimes 😆

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    I know you haven’t used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?

    I’m asking because I’m using an arch based distro, but I’ve been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they’re worth trying.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.

      Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.

      I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.

    • Danileonis @lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Void feel faster on old hardware due to systemd missing, the real problem is no-AUR imo.

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Other than the obvious things like arch having better docs and lots of packages, void reminds me of arch before systemd. Especially editing rc.conf etc.

  • nieceandtows@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?

    • 7ai@sh.itjust.worksOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it’s data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it’s hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It’ll download all packages again even though there’s minimal change.

  • Omniformative@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.