I started using git to track my dotfiles maybe one-ish years after I first fully adopted Linux as my daily driver… I think it’s been a little over 5 years and before I converted to nix that git history told a story of immense frustration of never being able to get my desktop and laptop to be identical. For some reason some projects only ran on one of the 2 machines. There was a period in my life when I didn’t use my desktop for 2 months because it just didn’t work well enough, OCD is really fucking painful. Nix saved my relationship with both of my computers, and my desk, and my spine. I haven’t used my laptop and maybe a month and I may have changed my workstation a couple hundred times in this period, I will with absolute confidence say that the next time I decide to use my laptop I can just run git pull and nixos rebuild and my laptop will be just the same as my desktop (minus obligatory build fixes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
NixOS answers that question I always had, “Do I have random residue from programs I uninstalled years ago lying around on my system?”, with a resounding “No”, and it feels amazing.
I started using git to track my dotfiles maybe one-ish years after I first fully adopted Linux as my daily driver… I think it’s been a little over 5 years and before I converted to nix that git history told a story of immense frustration of never being able to get my desktop and laptop to be identical. For some reason some projects only ran on one of the 2 machines. There was a period in my life when I didn’t use my desktop for 2 months because it just didn’t work well enough, OCD is really fucking painful. Nix saved my relationship with both of my computers, and my desk, and my spine. I haven’t used my laptop and maybe a month and I may have changed my workstation a couple hundred times in this period, I will with absolute confidence say that the next time I decide to use my laptop I can just run git pull and nixos rebuild and my laptop will be just the same as my desktop (minus obligatory build fixes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
NixOS answers that question I always had, “Do I have random residue from programs I uninstalled years ago lying around on my system?”, with a resounding “No”, and it feels amazing.