Person/Forrest Knight/YouTube/25/06/im sorry nixOS ive failed you
- A key take-away for me is that the NixOS paradigm conflicts with the auto-updaters of big IDEs like VSCode, JetBrains, Windsurf. Every time the OS has an update, it requires Nix-OS-specific workarounds. As a result, Forrest moved from NixOS to omakub, which is Person/David Heinemeier Hansson's opinionated Ubuntu setup. Given Forrest's prior affection for ArchLinux, he's closely watching DHH's Omarchy.
AI Notes from highlights #Snipd
- Early days were great: you customized NixOS (Hyperland, NeoVim, Waybar) in ~6h42m and loved the declarative, rollbackable setup that kept everything intentional and versioned, as noted in your highlights about the “first weeks of NixOS bliss” and declarative configs’ benefits (setup journey, why declarative clicked).
- Friction emerged with constant updates: JetBrains, Zed, and Windsurf updates repeatedly broke or required deep config debugging, turning simple updates into time sinks (update pain, JetBrains breaking).
- Software install hurdles: many tools needed unstable packages or custom flakes; common CLIs like Bun/FlyCTL required extra config and dependency wrangling (install issues).
- Tinkering shifted from fun to forced: you enjoy polishing, but NixOS made you tinker just to keep basics working, eating time you wanted for coding and experiments (tinkering time sink, preference shift).
- You ultimately wiped NixOS and moved to Ubuntu, first pushing your Nix config to GitHub; Ubuntu felt reliably “just works” for your workflow (switch to Ubuntu).
- omakub (by Person/DHH) gave you a one-command, polished dev setup you could easily tweak (themes, shell tools), letting you iterate without break-fixing (Omakube discovery, why starter script helped).
- Takeaway: NixOS is great, just not right for your current time budget—you want low-friction tools that let you explore fast, while still respecting NixOS’s strengths (reflection on fit, tool choice depends on time, match distro to time).