You do not need NixOS on the desktop

Summary

Imagine someone came up to you and told you that there exists a perfect Linux distribution. One so perfect that, as long as you take the time to learn its arcane syntax and strange conventions, you can obtain powers that a sysadmin can only dream of. A way to describe a machine through code once, and have it never break again. No longer will you have a broken display server after an update, or have to figure out a new configuration format for a service you want to run. Everything can be declared in a single file, in a single language, and reproduced on any other computer with a single command. You start seeing this distro mentioned everywhere. You see Hacker News threads on it. Videos about it appear on your YouTube home page, even though you haven't watched a Linux video for months. Your dog starts barking about build reproducibility (or maybe that's just a weird dream?). You'd be an idiot to not instantly switch all of your Linux machines over to it! Why aren't you using it already? This is how I felt when I first learned about NixOS. I fell in love with the idea, but after spending a year with it, I couldn't learn to love the implementation. The hook of NixOS is obvious to anyone who's ever had to manage a Linux machine. Hell, it's obvious to anyone who's had to manage a computer, ever. The idea of a reproducible build solves the problem of "I (fixed this issue/set up this service/did this thing) in this very specific way, but I can't remember how to do it again", and it's certainly a noble problem to solve! But one question that I almost never see brought up is, do you actually want this? A lesson in pain I got my Framework 13 laptop in November 2023. Before I had been using Manjaro on my desktop computer, after a while of hopping from Mint to Ubuntu to Arch. I could already feel the issues of using Manjaro day to day, so with my fresh new laptop, I wanted to step outside my comfort zone and try NixOS. I had read a bit about it, and decided that I had to try it ...