Setting up my new laptop: Nix style

This week I received a new 12th Gen Intel laptop from Framework. And like with any new piece of hardware I get these days, my first instinct was to put NixOS on it.

But I wasn’t just content with firing up the NixOS installer and getting to work. Oh no no no. You see, I knew there was a better way. I didn’t now exactly what that better way looked like just yet, but I could feel in my bones that it existed.

So I did what I usually do when I suspect there’s a better way of doing something in Nix land and pinged Mic92. What you’ll read in the rest of this post is the result of our conversations.

NixOS seems incredibly cool, but at the same time, it also seems obtuse and complex, and like any Linux system, it has its share of problems, too. I’m just not entirely sure if it’s of any value to most regular desktop Linux users, or if it is almost exclusively aimed at developers. Since NixOS seems to be popping up in comments all over the web, I’m trying to keep an eye on it and understand what, exactly, it offers over competing products.