birkeyWhy I love NixOS
I'd love NixOS more if they had any decent documentation.
Everything seems scattered around a dozen forums, a hundred old blog posts, and a thousand issues of "this work on my machine (3 releases ago)".
A lot of us use NixOS/nix yet haven't read any documentation nor hand-written nix ourself. That's Claude Code's job.
I would have never become a power user of Linux were I used LLM to do the installation of Gentoo once upon a time. :( So do you guys not know much about the distro you are using, or how does this work? I honestly thought your comment was sarcasm, but apparently it is not.
NixOS is high-level declarative, so you're reading high-level config diffs when the AI agent is pitching changes.
Unless you're brand new to Linux or computing, it's not a mystery what a given nix config change is ever doing.
You can probably guess what this does:
networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 8080, 9000 ];
The things to know about the OS are high level things. The rest of its idiosyncrasies you learn just in time through daily exposure like anything else.
Well, there's layers. When I started using nixOS I read through the guide and wiki but I also used LLM assistance to help create a stable starting point. Then over time I've incrementally added new things to my configuration through a mix of LLM assistance and reading online material.
I think the initial migration towards nixOS is the hardest point, since it requires learning a bunch of new things all at once in order to get the system into a usable state that matches your expectations and preferences. The key benefit of using an LLM is that it makes it really easy to get your system into a useful initial state, and then you can safely learn and experiment incrementally with a mix of tools.
When I started off I didn't understand everything, but at this point I feel I have a very good understanding of everything in my configuration file.