Hello NixOS
Over the past week or two, I’ve been migrating from Pop!_OS to NixOS. I figured I might as well write about that journey, so here I am.

Let’s start where all good stories start: the beginning
The calm before the storm
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a friend of mine pestered convinced me to try NixOS.
She put her dotfiles on GitHub, and I stole them took inspiration from them. Then I built my own config from there.
At this point, I was having a good time, and I was in the process porting my existing configs to use home-manager. But, then trouble started to arise.
Corruption ensues
For some still unknown reason, my nix store got corrupted in certain places. I kept getting vague Unexpected empty file
errors, which were of course a joy to debug! And by a joy, I mean unproductive and painful.
These errors didn’t prevent me from installing packages in a declarative manner, but they did stop me from using nix-env
commands. Sadly, home manager used nix-env
so I couldn’t update my configs.
I asked in the community discord, and the official forum, neither of which could find a solution. Soon enough, I just gave up and reinstalled NixOS with a similar config.
Rebirth
This reinstallation was short-lived as I realized that this was also broken 1. This was frustrating, since apparently NixOS errors are also reproducible. I did a bunch of smaller installs, using process of elimination to find the cause of my issue.
My prior configs used both stable and unstable channels 2. But, once I tried solely stable channels, everything magically worked. In some way, shape, or form, unstable was to blame, although it’s more likely I kept doing something stupid and unstable was just involved.
A C of errors
This is the second problem I ran into, but it’s more just because I don’t know Nix too well.
As you may know, NixOS likes to store all your packages in /nix
, and doesn’t bother following the FHS. Naturally, C toolchains aren’t a fan of this behavior. I referenced the NixOS wiki3, to try and find more information
The wiki page for C was kind of helpful, but didn’t have enough information for me to fully fix my issue. I was attempting to experiment with SDL2 and some of its extensions, but I couldn’t get it working.
I added a shell.nix
file and the suggested flags and everything, and then ran my Makefile
from a nix-shell
session. And it almost worked… almost.
Of course, more errors came. The bulk of them came from SDL2_image
including a file from SDL2
, which would be right next to each other in a normal system. But a NixOS system isn’t a normal system, so, the #include
failed.
I got pretty close to fixing this, but couldn’t quite solve it. I knew it involved pkg-config
, but I didn’t know how to set it up right. This is more of a documentation issue than a NixOS issue itself, but it’s still annoying that I spent a couple hours on this and couldn’t figure it out.
The solution here was to… drum roll please… use a different graphics library. raylib
, integrated into my shell.nix
, works like a charm! Well, a charm that doesn’t have proper IDE support.
Because even though the NixOS wiki for C mentions how to configure a language server with the paths, it didn’t work for me 4. This is a problem I’m still ignoring solving. I couldn’t figure it out in VS Code, Neovim, or Emacs5.
The good things
Up to this point, I’ve been pretty harsh and negative. Nonetheless, I’ve had a good experience with NixOS. It’s package collection is massive6, and if you can’t find what you need, then you can write it yourself.
The idea that I can configure everything in the format is intriguing, and it works out pretty well. The Nix language is a strange one, but it grows on you.
The big picture is that there were a couple bumps in the road, but I thoroughly enjoy NixOS. It abstracts away all the little annoying parts about Linux7, and makes them simpler and increases uniformity.
The installation process felt like a compromise between normal graphical installers, and a fully manual one like Arch0. There were some manual parts (ex. I had to partition and mount drives myself), but it wasn’t too bad. And because everything is reproducible, you can just paste a basic config, and build from there.
This process creates a certain kind of magic8 that’s hard to capture for other distributions. This magic means setting up a system is fun, rather than tedious. That fun is partially why I was okay with doing tons reinstalls, trying to fix my issues. It just feels good to edit your config and see changes magically reappear.
Modules
A new concept that NixOS enables is a modular config. Basically, you split parts of your config into modules, and then can enable or disable features. For example, I might make modules for:
- Desktop environments/window managers
- Programming languages
- Editors
Then you can enable and disable these with ease. This is something that would never be possible in a normal Linux7 system. Then, if you had multiple systems, you could use the same config, and just change the modules you have enabled.
Wrapping things up
I hope you enjoyed this post, and are maybe considering NixOS. The troubles I faced were worth the power of the OS. This was my first post on here, so please let me know if you enjoyed it!
Also, follow me on Twitter pls
- Technically, it took a week for me to realize it, but that’s because I was away from my laptop for a week [return]
- Mostly just unstable for neovim 0.5 [return]
- It isn’t as good as the Arch wiki, but still good. To be fair, the Arch wiki is kinda the golden standard of OS wikis [return]
- For a reproducible OS, there sure are a lot of doesn’t work on my machine problems [return]
- Yes I brought out the big guns, to no avail [return]
- The collection itself is good, but the versions feel slightly out of date on stable. It feels like stable versions of things aren’t available yet [return]
- I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. [return]
- Although magic is usually a bad thing in programming, I mean it in a good context here [return]