NixOS made me lose my wife

"They may be unstable but at least they notice when I'm in the room" -> As an arch user, fair. I can feel the change in air pressure as the door opens so I notice despite the noise canceling headphones

I showed this meme to my husband (who uses Arch, btw). He didn't know what NixOS was and is now curious. What have I done?
- You set a timer on your marriage, I'm sorry for you.
- The adult version of the old xkcd
  https://xkcd.com/456/
  
  Linux now has many mature distros that just work and don't require much configuration if any - which is the motivation for Nixos, probably
- Quick, be fast and setup a binary cache so that he can substitute nixos.org with you.
  Trust me, it's the only way.

You can nixos-rebuild her, you have the technology.

You may have lost your wife but at least you kept your virginity and thats the real victory !

I use debian btw (why do arch users get all the fun)
- Any downsides to switching to Debian from Arch? If using the testing branch it's mostly like Arch right?
  
  I’ve noticed that more and more, interesting new projects have nix, appimg, pkg, and docker releases. So on Debian, I need to rely on non-native packages or compiling more frequently than before. Not a big issue, but it’s a new awkwardness I wasn’t used to.
  
  no, texting is packages that are chosen to make it the next version of debian stable, the version your thinking of is debian unstable/sid, which is not a standalone os but a repo that you can change to after you install either testing or stable (unstable does not refer to the stability of your system but to the stability of package compatibility as it turns debian into a rolling release system like arch) Note: you can use Bookworm (stable) and trixie (testing) repos along with sid repos but it’s not recommended as it would make a frankendebian and might break stuff (see this for more info)
- Because you are too reliable ;(

I spent almost 20 years as that wife.

she/her
me, a broken man
Some mixed signals here... she should double-check gender.nix
- She was cis until she started using Nix.
  
  You can just recompile your gender. There's nobody who can stop you.
  
  Most trans people would say they were never cis. But if she's the exception, the breakup could be explained as a result of the transition if the wife is straight.
- It is a copy of the Reddit post, I doubt these two accounts are the same https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/s/7zuK1ifOOo
  Either way it's just a funny post, nobody would actually go through such a hyper focus leaving their wife behind....
  ... right?
  
  Christ, I knocked over my home theater system when I tried to transition to Mint and absolutely did spend a night sleeping on the couch over it.
- I believe it's because they're not using flakes properly. One of them is relying on an outdated channel, and ends up using outdated pronouns.
- I guess that's why the man is broken

Debian developer/user here. My marriage just works.
- To be fair, your SO is so old they don't know what a meme is. Maybe in a few more years they will catch up to the rest of us
  
  We will be hiking together until then.

Somehow NixOS really is like a fucking crack. I had like a 6 months non-stop hyperfixation about configuring everything using NixOS and Home Manager. Almost every evening. Now I have a polished setup of my personal and work laptops, homelab server and a VPS. And I have no regrets, this thing is amazing.

Uh oh. I just learned about NixOS right now and I'm intrigued.

The feeling of "conflating reality and whatever computer topic you're currently engrossed in" is too real.
- Nailing this regex will save me hours.
  
  Cramming for CCNA while also wedding planning and on codeine for a bad cough, many years ago...I remember the question of how many subnets to fit in each table crossing my head. Shit like that.
  (I mention the codeine because my body, as it turns out, has nearly no tolerance for opiates).

How much more complicated is NixOS compared to a neovim setup? On paper I love the idea.
- Much more I think. The initial setup is the hard part, and I would recommend keeping a second computer on the side so you can keep trouble shooting when your display driver shits the bed or your wifi module decides it would like to take a nap.
  
  I installed NixOS a couple months ago, and it's been my smoothest Linux experience to date. Everything just worked, except I had to figure out how to open the firewall for my network drive on my home server to be discoverable and usable. But that was fairly expected. I game, so I stress test the graphics routinely. No WiFi, though, so I guess that could maybe be flaky.
  
  Wouldn't you be able to just rollback to a working generation?

Arch User here btw.... she left me after pacman -Syu broke my system again. I think I saw her with a Debian User.... Damn stable systems!
- Debian girl here. We may not have updated anything in 5 years but boy howdy are things stable or what.
  
  Tch... Who can live with packages that are more than a few days old!? All my packages are bleeding edge and there are only ~~minor~~ _major version conflicts
- Debian here, it's true, I have both their wives
- I've never had things break after doing updates in Arch. Am I doing something different to most people in the "pacman -Syu" memes, or is the likelihood of breaking stuff overdone as a joke

So NixOS is like freebasing Arch, got it. I'm still tempted to spin up a VM, just a taste...
- Rip
  
  They'll find her years later, twitching and mumbling, buried under a printout of https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options

Ummm...
I use Arch btw 🙃
- Take care of that dude's wife.

whispering into the void
That's it, that's the problem. You talked to another distribution while still using the previous one. Yous lost your wife's trust, then it was over.

I'm a masochist, not only have I installed Arch from CLI several times, I've attempted running GPU passthrough to a Windows VM on several different distros just to play like 3 games that only run on Windows.
I attempted this through a fresh build of Arch, 7800 XT for the Linux system and an RTX 3090 for the VM. Every attempt in hijacking the 3090 failed, refusing to not load the card on boot. I struggled with this for hours and days, and through multiple different distros, all while my gf pretended to understand what the fuck I was talking about. "Ok, honey, I'll be in the living room watching my shows."
This went on for a while until I decided to give up and just build a second system dedicated for MichaelSoft Bindows.
When my Plex server had a botched TrueNAS update, this effected her as well. Not only were there shows she was watching on there, but she had to endure a week of me copying my media from different drives to rebuild the server on every piece of storage I had in the apartment. I'd come home from work and immediately continue working on it. Computers left on overnight with little progress bars slowly filling up. She'd call me into the kitchen for dinner or ask me to come to bed at 1am when we both had to be up at 6am.
She was actually supportive, maybe a little annoyed, but supportive nonetheless. Everything has now worked as intended for over a year and she even uses our home theater PC running Mint with no complaints or hiccups. Soon I will convince her to move her gaming PC to Linux as well, in due time though.
- Stay with her. Supporting you without understanding what the fuck it is you're doing is a huge green flag for a lasting relationship/marriage.
  Also, reflect on how you can give her the same support, with things where you don't know or understand her struggle.
- Soon I will convince her to move her gaming PC to Linux
  Soon you should convince her to marry you (if that's your thing)
  
  Already engaged 👈😎👈
- affected
- True love.
- Running truenas and Plex is an lol
  
  Care to explain? I run TrueNAS because it was the easiest for me to setup at the time. I'm not smart and it was a simple and free solution. Plex because Jellyfin wasn't where it is now, but also because again, I'm not smart and I have family outside my network use the server. Setting up wire guard and all that makes my brain hurt, let alone getting my mother to understand how to connect to Jellyfin.

What a noob, with just roll back to an earlier build of your relationship, duh!
- How? Please share dot file
  
  Dont need to with Nix lol.
  When it launches it has your previous configs locked and loaded (provided you dont nuke them)

At some point talking to a NixOS user becomes impsb bc they have evt as alias n they spk in it
- Ok color me intrigued, what is evt? I googled a bit and didn't find anything
  
  Everything
  But yeah, being super personalised is the joke. I don't see many NixOS users typing out nixos-rebuild outside of making tutorials.

Immutable distros are a great invention, and soon I'll be switching to one, once I figure out a couple of things.
- Definitely enjoy using my computer and less managing my computer. Trying new things and tinkering is much more liberating with immutables.
  
  Also, not tinkering when you don't want to tinker.
- Immutables are too hard for me. I prefer the simplicity of apt.
  
  That's one of those things I'm trying to figure out. They're actually a bit more complicated than your regular distro. They're not that bad, but my mind is not there yet. I need some time to dig into it and learn things. I'm definitely switching eventually.

my wife has endured so much waffle about how great nixos is
i feel bad for her

I've used various flavors of Arch for years. I tried Nix and spent several hours failing to do anything - like table-stakes shit like installing packages.
I went back to Arch.
- The way out is through
- Did you try Nix (on Arch) or NixOS? For the latter, https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-declarative-package-mgmt explains the basic installation.
  
  I clicked on the first link to the options appendix and noped right the fuck out.
  That's a level of involvement I reserve for activities where I either get paid 100€+/h, or otherwise support my family.
  And from what I hear, the main selling point of NixOS is how easy it is to reinstall.
  Which I don't do more than once every couple of years.
  And then I click "next" a bunch of times on Debian, and copy /home over from my backup.

I want to like Nix. The idea of declarative managing is super appealing. But I just don't have the time. My dream is to leverage both worlds, a cloud native Nix based OS. Every time I sit down to plan that task it looks daunting though.

I feel this, but my other love is gentoo...if only I could get portage to just stop finding more package masks or multiple instances of the same package slot..it's always something that makes me do another upgrade in an attempt to troubleshoot and it's usually because I get so caught up in just fixing silly mistakes that I forget to actually get to the eselect news that would have avoided the last stack of 6 compounding issues in the first place.
But I love how fun it is and I'm never leaving no matter what other nix-like cults pop up
- Between that and never having the money to upgrade my computer I finally had to give up Gentoo after nearly 20 years of use. I keep wanting to go back but its just too painful and I just can't bite the bullet to do a binary install.
  
  I'm pretty sure you could still find a decent thinkpad from ebay that would surprise you how cheap they are

Reddit ai generated slop.

Meme OSes are a cult of personality for nerds. I'll try it when it's been more battleworn and maybe gets some large org usage
- I mean... nix has been around for like 20 years at this point lol
  
  Also Mozilla uses it as far as I know
- Like juipeltje said, NixOS is older than Ubuntu, and I think about a month younger than Arch Linux
- It ain't bad. The only thing I wasn't able to get working so far was trying to build an react native expo app locally.