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NixOS is the best operating system I absolutely cannot recommend to anyone - Anurag Singh
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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I wonder how many Nix cheerleaders are aware of OSTree based systems like Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, etc? They provide the same immutability guarantees, but none of the pain and standards-defiance of NixOS.
I think Nix (the package manager) is a much stronger sell than NixOS. You can use Nix to install your apps on top of another immutable OS, whereas otherwise you might go with Flatpaks, containers, AppImages, etc. It's certainly better than adding Homebrew or some other manager like Pacman.
For devs, Nix is nice for people who can't or don't want to use containers for any reason (or want to use both!). I just don't see anyone benefiting from using NixOS except for Nix addicts.
Not as easy to have your entire system introspectable, sharable between devices, and under the same VCS. NixOS is declarative first and foremost, and all other benefits fall out from that; immutability is just one of them.
NixOS is a hack that shoehorns existing FOSS software into what an OS should really be. I doubt we'll get anything better for the foreseeable future, except maybe Guix.