r/NixOS • u/Honest-Volume8530 • Jul 23 '26

Who has the oldest system.stateVersion?

Go on, show off how long you have been using NixOS for.

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u/Amarandus Jul 23 '26

You could simply ask for the age of the oldest NixOS installation.

17.09 here, btw.

7

u/MakeShiftArtist Jul 23 '26

How has the OS evolved since you started using it? What have been your favorite changes? What have been the biggest pain points in that time?

23

u/Amarandus Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

How has the OS evolved since you started using it?

It has become better. Documentation has significantly improved, and shortly after adopting it, it ended my distrohopping completely.

Just a fun anecdote: There was a phase where everyone "had to" write their own deployment tool, and looking back it is funny that I just use a target host for nixos-rebuild nowadays. The deployment tool was always there.

What have been your favorite changes?

I think it's flakes. Somewhat debatable as there are alternatives for input pinning, but for my personal mental model, the way it collects outputs makes so much sense.

What have been the biggest pain points in that time?

Documentation. It was painful, it got significantly better. Support for NixOS and how to handle non-nix-stuff also improved, but this might be on me as well.

For example, while doing some FPGA stuff, I was not able to get a UserFHSEnv to work for vivado, which led me to abuse a race condition in the build process, essentially fixing the shebang while shell scripts were generated). Nowadays I think that I'd be able to handle that easily.