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NixOS is the best operating system I absolutely cannot recommend to anyone - Anurag Singh
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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This article is spot on. Fantastic operating system with a clear concept of how it should be done. And great for people that want to fight for it. But everything you want to do that's slightly off the path is a 3 hour research project in documentation that's pretty damn poor. It eventually wears you out.
Nixos user here for 4 years.
Yep
Its legit you want to try sway window manager?!?
Sway = true;
You want to change the keybinds and make it declarative.
MAY GOD HELP YOU.
Files.home
Is what u want and it took me 3 hours to find that
I love NixOS but it really does make the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I even take "vacations" from it. Like right now for example. I switched back to Arch for a bit as I found myself spending too much time playing around with my various nix configurations/modules and also getting frustrated in trying to get some random application to work. So went back to Arch so I don't have to think about stuff.
the beauty of NixOS is I can go back to it and be exactly where I left off in like 15minutes. I just need a break from it.
This reminds me of something I might have said of pre-alpha Gentoo days.
Gentoo is well documented and works almost out of the box.
Sure it is now, but it was not always. Gentoo didnt just spring forth from the aether full-grown.
The period of pre-0.1 that I reference above, ended in 2002 with the release of 0.1 Alpha. This is back when the idea of adding a binary installer was controversial in the gentoo community. That was 24 years ago, in case you are following along. So going on about the current state of Gentoo is not super relevant. I am glad it is better, but I am old enough to remember when it was a pretty gnarly ball of yarn and that is what I mentioned.
Is there no forum or discord for the distro? Or a self help book. Way back in the day that’s how i did shit on slackware. Irc and books.
There's a forum, which is fine, but the people on there are very insistent that you should do things "the nix way" and if you don't go all in on that then you get chastised.
As is tradition.
A bit of friction when going off the beaten path is generally a good thing. Some people always take this too far though
There's a manual, a discourse (forum) and a Matrix. And an unofficial subreddit and a Lemmy community. As well as two wikis and a large number of random people writing blog posts and tutorials.
This might be a hot take but honestly I think the documentation quality isn't the problem. You can point to specific topics that aren't well documented but that isn't unusual. What's unusual is how NixOS is designed and how working around its quirks requires close to distro maintainer levels of knowledge.
Most distros don't require several pages of documentation on how to install a Python application. NixOS on the other hand...
Ooof. Ok now I understand a bit. Thanks.
Pretty sure there's an unofficial discord server with around 16k members.