My Failed Switch to NixOS, or Why I Still Live in Chaos on Arch

A 538-Day Love Affair with the Bleeding Edge

I once told someone, "Nix is for stability. I live in organized chaos." I didn't realize how true that was until I tried to leave.

I gave NixOS a real shot. The promises of perfect reproducibility, declarative configurations, and atomic upgrades whispered sweet nothings in my ear. On paper, it's the endgame—a system as a pristine, version-controlled artifact. A monument.

But my computer isn't a monument. It’s a lab. And in my lab, things explode.

The Frictionless Playground

An idea strikes at 10 PM. A cool new CLI tool is trending on GitHub. My hands are on the keyboard, and the thought process is simple: I want to try that. Now.

On Arch, it’s a heartbeat:

yay -S some-cool-package

Five minutes later, I’m running it. Maybe it’s brilliant. Maybe it’s useless. Ten minutes after that, I’ve satisfied my curiosity, and it’s gone.

sudo pacman -Rns some-cool-package

It vanishes. No trace, no configuration to roll back, no “generation” to manage. The experiment is over. My system didn’t just allow it; it got out of the way.

This is my workflow. A constant, churning cycle of discovery and destruction. I don't want my system to remember my fleeting whims. I want it to be a blank canvas, ready for the next chaotic splash of paint tomorrow.

With Nix, I pictured that same 10 PM spark of curiosity, but instead of a quick command, I saw myself editing configuration.nix, adding a package, and patiently waiting for the system to rebuild itself. The process, designed for ultimate safety, felt like a cage around my curiosity.

Why Arch Still Feels Like Home

There’s a reason I’ve lasted 538 days on a single Arch install without a reinstall. It’s not because it never breaks. It’s because the philosophy fits me like a glove.

• The Bleeding Edge is My Comfort Zone: I like the thrill of a pacman -Syu and seeing hundreds of packages update. It's a direct connection to the living, breathing world of open source.
• The AUR is My Candy Shop: If a piece of software exists and can be compiled, I can try it in minutes. It’s the world’s most exciting, chaotic, and functional repository.
• Fixing is the Fun: The moments I’ve learned the most are when a bad config or a weird update breaks something. I don’t want guardrails. The process of digging in, understanding the problem, and fixing it myself is the whole point. It’s how the system becomes mine.

My setup is absurdly simple: /, /home, and a mount for my Windows partition. My cleanup crew is pacman -Qdtq, wiping away orphaned packages. It's a lean, mean, experimental machine.

A System for Play, Not for Posterity

Let’s be honest about my use case. I’m not running critical infrastructure. I am:

• Endlessly tweaking my own Neovim colorscheme (uwunified).
• Building a random Go CLI to update DuckDNS because it sounded fun.
• Patching dwm on a whim to see if I can make the bar look different.
• configuring my dotfiles

NixOS would look at this behavior and, rightly, try to protect me from myself. Arch just holds my beer.

I respect Nix. I admire its engineering. If I managed a fleet of servers or a team of developers where consistency was king, I’d be its biggest champion. But I’m not chasing a perfect, immutable system.

I’m chasing frictionless curiosity.

And for that, Arch Linux is still home.