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I switched from Nixos to void Linux. Here's my experience so far.

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.

excitingburp ,

data intensive

I take it you weren’t using flakes?

7ai OP ,

I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it’s data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it’s hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It’ll download all packages again even though there’s minimal change.

Omniformative ,

I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.

7ai OP ,

Interesting! Any reason for this choice instead of doing everything through nix?

TheAnonymouseJoker ,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Why do you not use Debian/Devuan?

SmoothSurfer ,

There are many ways to answer this question and vica versa you can oppose all of them with many more, just select something that fits you

TheAnonymouseJoker ,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

He is going for very specific configuration based good distros, which is why Debian/Devuan exists as one of the only answers to an Arch/SUSE/Gentoo user.

SmoothSurfer ,

Fair enough

7ai OP ,

I’ll try it sometime.

iopq ,

I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies

dino ,

Is this sarcasm?

blackstrat ,
@blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk avatar

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

iopq ,

I dispute the needlessly part. NixOS unstable has very new packages, do you’re getting some fresh updates before some other packaging systems.

Is it less “efficient” than waiting for major versions? Of course. But I’m willing to run an update in the background on my desktop to get that new software.

7ai OP , (edited )

Yeah I guess so then all those that remain are the benefits of Nixos 👍

monotrox ,

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 ,

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

cyclohexane ,

You might be interested in trying Gentoo, which is what I use. The package manager is definitely not fast, but it is very powerful. You get a lot of NixOS-like powers, but it integrates seamlessly into the unix eco-system without NixOS’ overhead or its unorthodox approach that causes trouble sometimes. It also has first class support for compiler optimizations and global management of compile flags for packages.

So yeah, updates will not be fast at all, but the rest I think you’ll enjoy.

cyclohexane ,

fwiw I really like nixOS. I like its ambitious approach. But I think it’s unorthodox approach is bound to cause issues. Most software has FHS and a typical Linux system in mind, and while nix solves those problems for most of them, there will always be something weird there.

7ai OP ,

I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I’m afraid it’ll compile for many days 😅

cyclohexane ,

How many cores and how much RAM? I run gentoo on a raspberry pi 😄

7ai OP ,

A laptop with 8 GB of ram and 6 cores. I have only one machine that I use for work. That’s the main issueI. Need to find a free weekend to compile and try out gentoo 😅

cyclohexane ,

I’d say your laptop is an ideal candidate for gentoo, especially if it’s at most 5 or so years old (it must then have hyper threading, so 12 virtual cores). It has just enough resources to compile packages with decent speed, but enough restriction that gentoo’s performance boost and optimizations will make a noticeable difference.

I actually have a laptop with the same resources as yours. Your compile times will not be as bad as you expect. Just make sure to use binary packages for big stuff, like browsers, the kernel, office suite, etc.

7ai OP ,

That’s quite convincing :) I’ve been meaning to try gentoo for many years actually. I’ll install it soon and report back!

featherfurl , (edited )

I also haven’t noticed a significant performance hit from using nixos on desktop coming from arch a few months ago. Nix definitely does a lot of stuff and that can chew through bandwidth at times, but overall I think the time saved from not compiling heaps of aur packages has outweighed the time lost to nix updating and maintaining the overall state of my system on every update.

I tend to run relatively lightweight systems these days and haven’t really noticed sluggishness compared to an equivalent system on arch. My desktop environment has been sway on both for a while and this may account for my experience of a leaner and more reliable system on both, but it’s hard to say.

I’d definitely want to investigate bandwidth optimization strats for nix if I was heavily constrained in that area, or possibly move to something where cpu and bandwidth constraints were given priority over reproducibility. For my current setup nixos has been a game changer on both desktop and server, but I only really have arch as a direct comparison.

( For context, my current desktop nixos systems are a 9 year old low-end cintiq, a 2017 dell optiplex 7050 minipc, and a steam deck. They all have ssds and at least 12gb of ram. All feel super snappy for everyday work with a web browser and a heap of open terminals and workspaces. )

7ai OP ,

Thank you that makes sense. When I get my hands on a more powerful machine and have less data constraints, I’ll try Nixos again. I do miss it sometimes 😆

Euphoma ,

In my experience, doing small changes to your nix config when using nix flakes seems to be faster. For me it only rebuilds everything when I run nix flake update before running sudo nixos-rebuild switch so it seems faster because it only does the thing that I changed instead of updating everything.

7ai OP ,

Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It’s just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.

senkora ,

Does Nix have Guix-style grafts? I know that in theory that is how Guix lessens the minor-update-to-core dependency problem. But I only use Guix for dev environments so I don’t know how well it works in practice.

lloram239 ,

Nix doesn’t support that officially, there is replace-dependency, but it’s not in common use:

nixos.wiki/wiki/Documentation_Gaps#Does_nix_suppo…

There is also patchelf to adjust the RPATH and other stuff backed into compiled binaries, which is in common use, but not for patching.

chayleaf ,

yeah that’s currently in the works (ca-derivations)

lloram239 ,

Also this in your configure.nix:


<span style="color:#323232;">  nix.registry = {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    nixpkgs = {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      from = {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        type = "indirect";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        id = "nixpkgs";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      to = {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        type = "path";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        path = inputs.nixpkgs.outPath;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>

This will create an entry in the nix registry pointing to your currently installed version and stop nix search from constantly updating the package list.

Lalelul ,

Are there any tradeoffs I need to accept to use this?

fugi ,

Not really, but you should update your flake every once in a while to get the latest packages

lloram239 ,

No, it just makes the nix command use the same nixpkgs repository your system is already using. Without it nix will constantly redownload the latest nixpkgs-unstable which is very slow. You will get slightly older software when you do something like nix run nixpkgs#blender (“old” here meaning the same version as if you had it installed on your current system), but if you just want to try something out, you probably care more about it being fast than the latest version.

And if you care about lastest stuff you’ll can just make yourself a nixpkgs-unstable registry entry with:


<span style="color:#323232;">nix registry add flake:unstable github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable
</span>

and than do:


<span style="color:#323232;">nix run nixpkgs-unstable#blender
</span>

Updating your OS isn’t impacted by any of this at all, as that happens via the /etc/nixos/flake.lock file as before.

PS: This assumes you are using flakes and the new nix command, both of which are still marked as experiment and not enabled the default.

Lalelul ,

Thanks a lot. I will give it a try. By the way, are you also using the NUR? Do you maybe know if I can configure the nix.registry to allow using NUR packages using nix shell as well?

lloram239 ,

Good question. NUR doesn’t seem to output the packages directly, but requires that you supply your pkgs manually. You can use nix shell with NUR, but it gets rather ugly:


<span style="color:#323232;">nix shell --impure --expr '(import (builtins.getFlake github:nix-community/NUR) { pkgs = (import  {}).pkgs; }).repos.mic92.hello-nur'
</span>

nix registry doesn’t help here, as it’s just for managing aliases that allow you to type “nixpkgs” instead of “github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-23.05” in some places.

It might be possible to write a flake that outputs NUR packages for direct use, e.g. something like:


<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  inputs = {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-23.05";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    nur_src.url = "github:nix-community/NUR";
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils, nur_src }:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      let
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        nurpkgs = import "${nur_src}/default.nix" { pkgs = pkgs; nurpkgs = pkgs; };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      in {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        packages = nurpkgs.repos.mic92; // FIXME: this needs more work and filtering
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    );
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

Which gives:


<span style="color:#323232;">$ nix --allow-import-from-derivation flake show .
</span><span style="color:#323232;">git+file:///
</span><span style="color:#323232;">└───packages
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ├───aarch64-darwin
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───bing-image-creator: package 'python3.10-bing-image-creator-0.4.4'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───clearsans: package 'clearsans-1.00'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───cntr: package 'cntr-1.5.1'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───conky-symbols: package 'ConkySymbols'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───eapol_test: package 'eapol_test-2.10'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───edge-gpt: package 'python3.10-edge-gpt-0.13.1'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───fira-code-pro-nerdfonts: package 'nerdfonts-3.0.1'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───gatttool: package 'bluez-5.66'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    │   ├───gdb-dashboard: package 'gdb-dashboard-0.11.4'
</span>

But needs some more work and might be reinventing the wheel. Haven’t used NUR myself and no idea what the state of flakes in NUR is.

Drito ,

How the hell many people installs Void without problems. I tried two times and I always had wierds behaviours that makes me going back to arch.

7ai OP , (edited )

Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years ago 😆

Drito ,

One year approximatively. But I elaborate a bit, I installed the minimal version, because I use bspwm. I had issues since the tty log in. Probably the xfce iso is OK.

7ai OP ,

Yep. I used the Xfce iso.

nik282000 ,
@nik282000@lemmy.ml avatar

VM. Always practice new systems in a VM. Took me half a dozen tries to get a fuckup-free Void install in a VM but only one on the actual hardware.

CjkOvPDwQW ,

Did you follow their docs ? Read page by page and everything should work fine.

yopyop ,

Could you also share the differences you perceived between Arch and Void ?

danileonis , (edited )
@danileonis@lemmy.ml avatar

Void feel faster on old hardware due to systemd missing, the real problem is no-AUR imo.

blank_sl8 ,

Systemd won’t make anything slower once the system is booted up, it’s barely doing anything.

dino ,

Benefit. If you never used AUR before and never felt the need to use it.

Holzkohlen ,

I don’t need a lot from the AUR, but a few packages I can’t dl without. Tbf those would be in the official repos in other distros like fedora. I’ve got some weird bugs with fedora though. I just use endeavourOS cause it’s so hassle free. One of the best distros period.

LeFantome ,

I love EndeavorOS. It is basically just Arch plus 20 packages but it makes such a difference.

7ai OP ,

Other than the obvious things like arch having better docs and lots of packages, void reminds me of arch before systemd. Especially editing rc.conf etc.

dino ,

Very reasonable and insightful write up. Thanks for sharing!

7ai OP ,

Thank you!

norawibb ,
@norawibb@sh.itjust.works avatar

That is so the opposite experience for me. Every other distro for me just ends up weird after using it too long and I get the symptoms you mentioned. Nixos always stays perfectly clean for me like I never touched it. My hardware (long story) does change my experience a little though.

7ai OP ,

Yeah there’s a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.

In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a “fresh install” on every reboot.

nieceandtows ,

I’ve been experiencing a total system crash/hang due to Firefox or steam on endeavour OS. Never had such issues on nobara. Any idea why?

lloram239 ,

When you have full system crashes there is a very high chance it’s the graphics drivers, journalctl -b -1 might show some information why it crashes, as it’s often just the graphics output that freezes, not the rest of the system.

Another common form of crashing is just running out of memory. Linux still handles that not well at all and will just freeze for a long long long time (SysRq-F will invoke the OOM killer, which can often help and speed up the process dramatically, there are other workaround like earlyoom).

mrh , (edited )
@mrh@mander.xyz avatar

edit: I do feel norawibb’s point, the slippery mutability of Void is something I am a lot less comfortable with than I used to be. Apparently Guix has spoiled me.

7ai OP , (edited )

🎉 Same! I’ve been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.

mrh ,
@mrh@mander.xyz avatar

Yeah rollbacks are probably the best part of immutable OS’s, but of almost equal importance is reproducible system configuration, which imo only Nix and Guix do well. Neither snapshots nor Silverblue really manage that yet.

7ai OP ,

Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.

dino ,

Can you give an example in what kind of scenario you would want “identical servers”? In my head that is where tools like ansible come into play…?

7ai OP ,

You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.

Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.

Chewy7324 ,

The great thing about Nix is that it achieves reproducibility with the package manager. Container and Ansible depend on taking a system and documenting steps to bring it to the desired state. This state then might deviate over time (e.g. crashing while updating).

But yes, for most practical use it probably doesn’t make much of a difference. For me Nix forces me to document what I’m doing, which I might not do for “quick and simple change” on other systems.

Andy ,
@Andy@programming.dev avatar

For reproducible configuration in the Arch world, there’s a project which always looks good to me: aconfmgr

github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

I think Arch+aconfmgr+yadm+btrfs == a pretty solid arrangement.

Though I’m of course itching for first class Bcachefs support…

Chewy7324 ,

My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I’m forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.

7ai OP ,

That’s right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)

It’s definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)

dino ,

Cool that you mention also the other contender OS in that regard. Interestingly you both chose Void as your comparison…I would be curious to why? @7ai

7ai OP ,

I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it’s new and an independent distro. I’ll try the other two some day.

dino ,

I sense a dislike for systemd. :D Actually didn’t know alpine is gentoo based. Thanks for your insight.

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

It is not. Alpine is independant and uses a ports-like packaging system.

dino ,

ports as in BSD?

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes.

7ai OP ,

I was just going off based on its history. It began based on gentoo. (Wikipedia) but yea it is independent now.

Xylight , (edited )
@Xylight@lemmy.xylight.dev avatar

Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.

edit: this isn’t arguing against him, i’ve heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.

7ai OP ,

You mean in terms of how fast it feels? I have never heard anyone saying this before. Can you share some details and perhaps some tips to improve performance on Nixos?

What hardware do you run Nixos on and do you modify and rebuild a lot of packages on nixpkgs?

Neil ,
@Neil@lemmy.ml avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Xylight ,
    @Xylight@lemmy.xylight.dev avatar

    Wat? I wasn’t attacking him, I was telling my experience.

    LeFantome ,

    He is assuming that you are trying to win an argument and seeing your strategic approach to doing so. It is kind of implied that you want to win the argument without having to defend your position or even be right.

    I did not get that from your comment. It felt like you were more genuinely surprised to see others relating experiences you have not had. I have left very similar comments myself.

    It sucks that the Internet makes us instantly distrust each other.

    Fubarberry ,
    @Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz avatar

    I know you haven’t used it for 4 years, but how would you compare arch to Nix and Void?

    I’m asking because I’m using an arch based distro, but I’ve been eyeing both nix and void and wondering if they’re worth trying.

    7ai OP ,

    Arch and void are very similar except void has a smaller community and much smaller set of packages to install. Arch also has better documentation.

    Void is considered more lightweight because it uses runit instead of systemd and a choice to use musl instead of glibc.

    I feel for most, arch is a better choice of the three.

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