this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All I year about from the linux community is NixOS and btrfs, neither of which I have any interest in. It almost feels like someone with an agenda is promoting these two with how prevelant they are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like using btrfs with Arch because of the snapshots. If an update breaks something I can just boot into a snapshot from grub keep using my PC and solve the problem later. It's very useful... yes... very... you should try it... come... try btrfs... it's warm and cozy... INSTALL IT!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have tried btrfs in the past and when it goes wrong you are utterly shafted. You can't even mount it as a read only file system, it will just lock you out entirely. And the support isn't great, I ended up finding something that had a disclaimer along the lines of "only run this if you really know what you're doing", but obviously I didn't as the documentation didn't tell me enough to know. So the only people who could possibly know are the developers of the file system themselves. Anyway, I was 2 days in to trying to recover my data by this point so I gave it a go, nothing to lose - it refused to do anything. Great.

So in summary I'm not going to try it again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

can confirm, I've recently had my btrfs partition on NixOS go permanently read-only because it ran out of metadata space (which you can't extend without write access, even though btrfs does reserve 0.5GB of metadata space) so I've switched to bcachefs