Remember the days when everyone and their pet iguana was raving about Arch Linux? You couldn't escape the ever-so-subtle "I use Arch BTW" remarks in every Linux forum. Well, move over, Arch, because NixOS is here to steal your thunder! Nowadays, it seems that you can't browse YouTube or read a blog without stumbling upon someone extolling the virtues of NixOS and how it is the epitome of computing perfection. But hey, who needs critical analysis when we can jump on the hype train and declare NixOS as the new Arch? Because that's exactly what's going on. NixOS has now become the self-proclaimed prodigy that's poised to dethrone Arch Linux as the holy grail of Linux distributions. The time is calling, my friends! It's time for you – the seasoned Linux enthusiast – to dust off your keyboard warrior capes and embark on a new crusade. So, grab your Tux plushie (or, your pitchforks if you belong to the world of devils) and let's embark on an adventure through the enigmatic world of NixOS (and let the memes commence)!
Having options is not the same thing as documenting those options; well outlined documentation doesn’t just dictate how to do something but also points out what you may want to do i.e. filling out unknown-unknowns.
Just because NixOS makes for an excellent DevOps template doesn’t mean it can’t also be an excellent platform for hacking together random crap. I understand that NixOS advertises itself as the former, but when I say “promises to be” I don’t mean “makes a promise to be”, but “has promise for being”.
Features like: a common configuration interface, safe rollback, atomic changes, nixos-hardware all are features that enable developers to safely hack together solutions, and then have an excellent log detailing what they just did.
Agreed. The point is however that, with NixOS options, you do not necessarily need such documentation for unknown-knowns.
With many things however, we can simply delegate to the upstream documentation for some thing. See i.e. the paperless extra config example. We don’t need to tell users how to configure their paperless, we just tell them that any upstream option goes into this settings option as an attrset.
NixOS options do to a degree fill out unknown-unknowns though, see I.e. the steam-hardware example. I’ve stumbled upon many handy options by searching for related options.
While the initial “hacking the crap together” phase is indeed harder in most cases, maintaining these hacks is much simpler thanks to overrides/overlays and the additive nature of NixOS options.
That quality can arguably make it “excellent” too.