I am playing around with Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE Aeon and I really like the painless updates.
Still, my daily driver for some years now is Debian, and I have a decent setup via Ansible - everything just works for me.
My question is mostly to long term Linux users, which use Linux in a professional context and jumped from a distribution like Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE or Debian to NixOS, Silverblue, Aeon etc.
What is your experience? How did your workflows change on your immutable Linux distribution? Did you try immutable and went back to a more traditional distribution - why? How long are you running the immutable distribution and what issues and perks did you run into?
NixOS is great
My workflow hasn’t changed much except I now find myself writing shell.nix files in my projects instead of having various compilers and build tools installed in my config itself since adding a random one-off dependency for a project is tedious if it doesn’t get added to the correct environment variable or something. Ultimately, this is really a benefit tho as it means I have a reproducible dev environment that can be shared with anyone else.
It also simplifies a lot of configuration stuff with sane defaults making it way easier to spin up things that might take a little bit of messing around, e.g. different desktop sessions (currently, I mostly use i3 and GNOME Wayland + Pop Shell, but I’ve experimented with others).
It’s more about how clear it is for me to get to my workflow. The Nix system (language, package manager, and OS) is really just beautiful once you get your head around everything.
I’ve been on Nix now for a few months coming from Fedora (1 year) and before that Arch (3 years), and I’ve loved every second so far. I use it for both work (embedded software engineer) and personal. It feels like the last thing I’ll ever config