Leaving Virgin Fedora for Chad NixOS
Thanks for all the kind words and support on my first article. It means a lot to me that people are willing to read my autistic yapping sessions in text form.
I've left Fedora for NixOS. I know--very brave of me, especially in these times. I want to explain my issues with Fedora, how I got on to NixOS, and why I ended up ditching Fedora for it.
1. Fedora
Fedora was always very buggy for me. Upon my first install around May of 2024, I dared to touch KDE Discover and run an upgrade through it. Foolish, I was, for it bricked my system(!).
So I reinstalled.
Even after another reinstall some months later, oom-killer always froze my entire system for 15 minutes before actually doing its job. And sometimes dnf upgrade would randomly break my system and I'd have to go spelunking through google and journalctl to figure out what it broke and fix said breakage. (Spoiler: 9/10 times it was SDDM.)
And the more crap I installed on my system, the worse it got. GNOME colour choosers would appear in KDE, GTK4/libadwaita theming broke randomly once and I was never able to fix it, and TODO: write a third thing in this sentence.
Then came the final straw: Installing qutebrowser. Which, after a reboot to test my luck after a scary error message, caused a black screen of death right before login.
I'll admit that it was partially my fault, because I saw it erase some critical KDE packages, but to my credit:
- I thought it was just upgrading them and removing the old ones; and
- that should never happen in the first place! Installing new apps should NEVER break your system like that.
And even this BlaSOD had happened before! When I hadn't even touched my computer for 3 months!
As you can tell from the tone of this section, I was fed up. Pissed, even. Just absolutely livid. I don't want my system to ever break. I hate having to fix it. It's not even that I don't have the time for it--it's just "coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere."
Luckily, I had NixOS on standby. So I jumped for it. And so far--only about an hour after the switch--I'm lovin' it. (Not as much as a cheeseburger though.)
2. NixOS
NixOS was always very stable for me. Upon my first install around August of 2025, I was following a(n unnecessary) tutorial that claimed to allow you to dualboot NixOS and Windows, because I still wanted to run Windows on my system at the time. However, I was unfamiliar with the rsync command then, and managed to wipe out the Windows bootloader. Oops.
But that was the only problem I remember ever having with NixOS. And it was completely my own fault.
And that's the thing: on NixOS, if--not when--something breaks at all, it's probably user error. And you can just roll it back if something does happen! That is infinitely less frustrating than seemingly random breakage when doing a simple dnf upgrade on Fedora.
But wait--there's more! On NixOS, configuration is a simple text file. Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is vastly simpler compared to Fedora. You just add the appropriate lines to your configuration.nix pertaining to drivers and make sure to set hardware.nvidia.open to false. How easy is that!? On Fedora, you need to manually 1) muck around with RPM repositories and 2) build a kernel module from source. With NixOS, 1) you don't need to add a new repo, and 2) the module automatically gets built on a simple nixos-rebuild switch. As easy as that.
Thought we were done yet? Oh no, I still need to tell you about flakes! You see, Nix flakes are basically development containers where the configuration is specified as a pure function in the Nix language. It's incredibly convenient for managing different versions of the same packages, and for not cluttering up your system packages with compilers, utilities like vite, etc. You can even run flakes directly from the Internet without having cloned the repository beforehand. I don't really use that feature, but it's probably useful for someone I guess.
Oh and one last thing--nixpkgs is the biggest Linux package repository, period, eclipsing even the mighty AUR. If you want something, nixpkgs has got it. I did not find this was the case with the Fedora repos, or even COPR. So yeah.
For a while, I ran NixOS alongside Fedora just so I could learn it. But I decided eventually that I needed to switch full-time at some point to fully embrace Nix. And that time has come.
3. Conclusion
So yeah! I'm loving NixOS. It's very convenient, what with flakes and all, but more importantly, it's very stable and reliable. And also very gay. Half the userbase is gay furry trans women. I would know because I am one.
I still need to do things like install Steam, split off my config into multiple files, copy over some of my configs, things like that. Still, I am a very happy customer.
Fedora is Dead (on my system, at least). Long Live the Nix.