lloram239 , 11 months ago

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.