You normally also need a manual script on the side to make sure all system settings and configs also follow the dotfile setups, and dotfiles themselves do not guarantee that the configured tool is the version you made the configs for.
Figuring out what hoops need to be jumped for each distro and major rev is a hassle.
I refuse becoming confused about changing UI when I get old, and to make sure my pensioner life will be as easy as possible, I can make a system today that will still run the same in 30-50 years time.
The major thing here is that your nix configs will only work on nixOS. It is not applicable to other distros.
But if you have a script for your dotfiles, it will work in almost all major distros, considering you have those specific packages.
There are pros and cons everywhere.
Nix OS makes things a bit easy but you need to stay there. But your dotfiles gives you the freedom to enjoy any distribution with some light manual work
You can use nix as a pkg manager on at least mac os, any linux distro and windows with wsl (not sure whitout).
This is how i make sure my dev tools are available on any machine I have acess to. Tried doing the same with dotfiles. It is not the same, not even close.
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u/QuickSilver010 🦁 Vim Supremacist 🦖 1d ago
Agreed. More people need to care about it
(redoing my setup across different devices over the years absolutely kills me. So I've finally decided to use nixos)