And you know what the worst part is? I didn't even care about declarative configuration! But Nix has the best of all worlds in a way nothing else does. It's like if you took all the goods from atomic distros and flatpaks with none of the bads. The FHS-noncompliance is hitting me like a truck because I play a lot of recompilations and non-steam videogames that are only distributed as crude binaries (pokèwilds, the symphony of the night recomp, sm64dx-coop, bb-launcher, rpg paper maker etc). But god, now that I've tried NixOS, every other distro feels lacking. I don't think I can go back to the messy-ness of traditional distros, nor the confinement headaches of immutable distros. I am so glad NixOS exists

I run a pretty minimal Arch setup with bash script that installs packages and symlinks my dotfiles, which works just fine for reproducing my desktop setup. I am not looking to switch to NixOS, it feels like overkill for what I need on the system level.

What I am interested in is using Nix purely as a package manager to get reproducible dev environments, something I can pull down on any machine that has Nix installed and get working.

I have gone through the official nix.dev docs, and from what I can understand shell.nix or flakes (seems experimental but quite a lot recommend it anyway) is what I need. I have also been experimenting with mise but nix seems to be capable of a lot more. Time will tell.

Any advice from people actually running plain Nix for development in 2026?

Note: For me maintaining NixOS config feels similar to maintaining my bash script with extra steps and different kind of learning curve, so please don't recommend to switch to NixOS if possible. That's not my goal yet. I will make the switch myself if needed.

I do not intend to raise any troll but rather ask passionate users to provide feedback...

everything is in the title but long story if needed -

I imagine if someone was looking to a more traditionnal linux (at least in the sense of FHS), yet robust OS, Fedora atomic could be a possible choice.

Apparently BlueBuild even allows "recipes" ( https://blue-build.org/reference/recipe/ ) and it seems it could be easier to leverage "standards" like appimage, python scripts, and so on.

I do not consider any switch at the moment since I invested some time and config is working great on NixOS, this is one of the rare OS I ever liked : very stable, actually the most reliable OS I ever testsed, and it is very pleasant to "admin" a declarative OS -- no need to talk about it here, you certainly love it too! well as far as i "admin" my linux -- doing nothing brillant, just using it ;)

Anyway sometimes NixOS raises issues we do not face with "usual boring distro". Cargo has like 20 methods! It feels like Nix invented the right ideas but tech was not totally available so weird implementation had to take place. Could some "modern" atomic even improve this? Or maybe do you feel Nix itself could improve?

When designing NixOS config. Is forcing my LLM to NOT use specialArgs and extraSpecialArgs a good idea? To both tame the crazy monkey chaos and give me a chance to learn properly.

I am building my first NixOS config across all my computers and trying to use as conventional a setup as possible using flakes, NixOS modules and Home Manager.

Leaning very very heavily on LLMs because its very overwhelming. Pulled every repo, downloaded every skill and making Claude explain me every line of code as I hand write it.

In studying other peoples skills I have noticed that a lot of the dendritic skills actively discourage specialArgs and extraSpecialArgs. I do aim to move in a few months to dendritic but right now normal NixOS modules are a mountain I need to climb first.

My understanding is that banning specialArgs/extraSpecialArgs forces the configuration toward things like:

• normal module options and config
• ordinary module imports/composition
• lexical let bindings for local values
• existing NixOS/Home Manager options rather than arbitrary injected arguments
• small reusable modules with more explicit dependencies

It gives me less to take in and fewer hidden sources. If a module needs something it comes clearly through the modules rather than a mystery sack of arguments injected at flake root. So fewer mechanisms for me to understand as I am a pretty green beginner. (its also my first Linux install).

Am I correct that this makes Dendritic migration cleaner afterwards?

Is there any functionality that I am now missing? Am I handicapping my config? or can I comfortably live a healthy NixOS life without these arguments?

What concrete applications are there that I MUST use specialArgs and extraSpecialArgs?

What normal NixOS config setups am I going to make unnecessarily awkward by doing this?

Is it a good idea? I basically want to stop the LLM from monkey rabbiting values around everywhere in an opaque way.

Sorry for the Noob question! I have searched the REDDIT archives a lot about this.

tldr: Is there any reason to use flake-parts in my NixOS config if I'm only configuring one host, or if all hosts are x86_64-linux systems?

I recently installed NixOS again after a few years, I have been looking into the dendritic pattern/flake-parts as an approach to my updated config. From popular examples, it presented itself as a solution to writing and keeping track of long 'imports = [];' statements in multiple files. After getting a feel for it and aiming to design my updated config around a single common system, I'm starting to realize this is not the case. It appears that flake-parts modules better suit someone who wants to design their configuration around multiple different systems (x86-64, darwin, etc.). If this is the case, I will most likely move away from flake-parts as continue to work on my config.

so i do have a all amd build, and im done with winslop (windows) and i want to game. im new to linux, ive used cachyos before, and im open to learn new things, even if it takes me a long time.
so should i?

If you didn't know, you're about to that August 6, 7, 8, 9 was DEF CON 34 and Nixers were definitely present. Join Alex, Chris, Morgan, Jared, Dan, Tristan and I for a recounting of Nix Vegas, the official Nix space at the latest DEF CON.

Full Time Nix | Nix Vegas 2026

My flatpak GTK apps look bad and out of place in KDE. I've been trying a lot of config snippets to fix this, and haven't figured it out yet, even with all my cunning. Can someone have a look at my config and let me know if I'm missing some magic to get a more consistent theme across all my apps?

 environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    kdePackages.breeze-gtk
    kdePackages.kde-gtk-config
    kdePackages.qt6gtk2
    kdePackages.qtsvg
  ];

  xdg.portal = {
    enable = true;
    extraPortals = [ pkgs.kdePackages.xdg-desktop-portal-kde ];
    config.common.default = "kde";
  };

  system.activationScripts.flatpak.text = ''
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtkrc:ro
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-2.0:ro
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-3.0:ro
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-config/gtk-4.0:ro
  '';

  # https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Flatpak - for all users
  services.flatpak = {
    enable = true;
    packages = [
      "org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze"
      "org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze-Dark"
    ];
  };

hi !!

After almost five years of using Fedora Kinoite, I switched to NixOS because I ran into issues with the latest version (44).

There are some things that bugs me, like install or use a pkgs that is not in the repos, example godot 4.8-dev4, I have to create a script to build it and then install, or use nix-ld or just use it in a shell.

So, just as I was trying to get used to this new workflow, then I read this news: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded/79413 also I didn't understand the thing about DHH (just watched and read some parts and many comments that are not agree with him).

What is the current situation with NixOS? I've seen various posts saying "this has happened before".

Also, after a week of reading, copy-pasting, rebooting, and rebuilding, I don't want to just throw it all away.

Now I tried in my second pc, fedora atomic sway and its not the same, I cant change the qt icons in qt apps, or set properly qt themes, nixos feels more lightweight in cpu, ram and gpu, and I prefer hyprland.

hello everyone
i want to try nixos but some packages take along time to be updated
like faugus-launcher and i use it everyday
or the linux kernel
so is there a way to update it and make the os like arch or i just wait

Hey guys, I need to use JavaFX with Eclipse. I'm really struggling to get to grips with it for NixOS. I used to dual boot just to use JavaFX. But I'm fed up with that, so I would like some help to use NixOS for this as well. I installed IntelliJ IDEA in the hope that it would work, but it doesn't. I also tried OpenJFX, but the main problem is that the Eclipse runner doesn't work with NixOS. If anyone uses JavaFX under NixOS, it would be great to get some help.