For everyone who doesn’t have several different systems to maintain, I find the advantages of nixOS to be marginal. Sure, you can argue about atomicity and all, but honestly I don’t remember ever running into a serious problem with debian either. The huge package repo is nice, but I rarely encounter an app I can’t get through apt, flatpak, or as an appimage.
At the same time, nix also has various downsides. Documentation sucks. There are two main ways to manage the system, they both pretend to be the better one, and it’s super hard to even get started. That’s not an issue with the technology, but just a lack of priority. Guix is much better on that end (but also comes with the same marginal advantages).
On the other hand, debian has a stable community, with proper processes, democratic structures etc.
This is a nice, kind of old presentation from debconf, where people discussed nix and how this could be useful in a debian context as well:
Personally I’ve found the transition to be much more than marginal. Systems are defined not by the state of the machine itself but by the config describing it which is much more transparent and manageable. Non-declarative systems are great if you’re just running small services, are changing and experimenting a lot. Or just don’t can’t if your system goes down or bloats over the year. Declarative systems save you whole lot of management headaches especially if you are working with others, or aren’t constantly reviewing your old work.
For everyone who doesn’t have several different systems to maintain, I find the advantages of nixOS to be marginal. Sure, you can argue about atomicity and all, but honestly I don’t remember ever running into a serious problem with debian either. The huge package repo is nice, but I rarely encounter an app I can’t get through apt, flatpak, or as an appimage.
At the same time, nix also has various downsides. Documentation sucks. There are two main ways to manage the system, they both pretend to be the better one, and it’s super hard to even get started. That’s not an issue with the technology, but just a lack of priority. Guix is much better on that end (but also comes with the same marginal advantages).
On the other hand, debian has a stable community, with proper processes, democratic structures etc.
This is a nice, kind of old presentation from debconf, where people discussed nix and how this could be useful in a debian context as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGrcLEweglg
So, if you FOMO, don’t worry. Debian and other options have this on the radar and have their ways to adapt (even if slowly)
Personally I’ve found the transition to be much more than marginal. Systems are defined not by the state of the machine itself but by the config describing it which is much more transparent and manageable. Non-declarative systems are great if you’re just running small services, are changing and experimenting a lot. Or just don’t can’t if your system goes down or bloats over the year. Declarative systems save you whole lot of management headaches especially if you are working with others, or aren’t constantly reviewing your old work.