this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] norawibb@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Andy@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

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

https://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...

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

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[–] Euphoma@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Also this in your configure.nix:

  nix.registry = {
    nixpkgs = {
      from = {
        type = "indirect";
        id = "nixpkgs";
      };
      to = {
        type = "path";
        path = inputs.nixpkgs.outPath;
      };
    };
  };

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.

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[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] chayleaf@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

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

[–] Drito@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Drito@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] nik282000@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] cyclohexane@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

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[–] dino@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very reasonable and insightful write up. Thanks for sharing!

[–] 7ai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago
[–] featherfurl@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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. )

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[–] iopq@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] monotrox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] yopyop@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] danileonis@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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

[–] blank_sl8@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] Xylight@lemmy.xylight.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

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