NixOS: The Good, The Bad, and The Awesome

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve used Linux for any meaningful amount of time, you’ve probably distro-hopped at least once. Maybe twice. Maybe you lost count. Each distribution promises a slightly better experience — faster updates, more stability, better hardware support — but under the hood, most of them share the same fundamental approach: install packages imperatively, mutate the filesystem in place, and hope things don’t break on the next upgrade.

I’ve been running NixOS as my daily driver for a while now, and I can confidently say it’s unlike anything else in the Linux world. It solves real problems that no other distro even attempts to address, but it also introduces new friction that can be genuinely frustrating. This post is my honest take on the experience — what’s good, what’s bad, and why I still think it’s awesome.

Devops on HectorZelaya.dev

NixOS: The Good, The Bad, and The Awesome