Despite having spent years daily driving on Linux, I never had a decent dotfiles repository/desktop config before. That changed at the beginning of this year however, since I finally got the courage to try out NixOS - the Linux distribution that is notorious for its steep learning curve - after reading d-rens’ blog post on things that repaid him well for the efforts he put into them. And honestly, I do think that learning NixOS has made the process of customizing my desktop more enjoyable and reliable. Things that I can’t seem to figure out or used to not work on other Linux distros now works on NixOS. I can declare the entirety of my systems and setups and expect them to work anywhere. I can never worry about borking my system again, thanks to rollbacks…

It felt like I found out what has been preventing me from having a decent desktop configuration. It just that I have never felt so hooked into writing config files before.

The Linux experience just hasn’t been the same since the day I switched to NixOS, and though the process of configuring did become a bit more grueling and there were also some things that doesn’t work as I expected, I do think that it is worth the learning effort to get what NixOS has to offer, and I believe NixOS will improve even more over time.

And that also concludes my 4 years long distro-hopping journey :)

Kali Linux -> Ubuntu 20.04 -> Kubuntu -> Archcraft -> Arch Linux -> Artix Linux -> Void Linux -> Arch Linux -> Debian -> Arch Linux <-> Alpine Linux -> FreeBSD -> Alpine Linux -> GNU Guix -> NixOS (we're here)

The only thing left is to join the contributors club. You will eventually see me on search.nixos.org on some beautiful day.

Thanks to d-rens, Nguyễn Huy Hoàng, cnx for offering to help me during the journey