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.

  • iopq@lemmy.ml
    72·
    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

      • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It has to be! No one can hate themselves so much they deliberately go out of their way to use something needlessly slow

    • monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de
      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
        1·
        1 year ago

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