Almost Went Back: One Month on NixOS | nezutero<br>Almost Went Back: One Month on NixOS<br>21 Jul, 2026<br>This is Part 2 of my Linux Odyssey series. Part 1 covers my path from Ubuntu through Arch Linux and why I decided to try NixOS in the first place. If you haven&rsquo;t read it, start there.<br>The Breaking Point<br>About a week after I published my first post, I had a crisis of confidence.<br>I had been using NixOS for roughly four weeks at that point, and I was deep in it: learning about flakes, home-manager, the differences between various configuration approaches, the philosophy behind the whole project. I had hit several footguns, sat through long debugging sessions, and felt the weight of having an infinite number of ways to do any given thing. Instead of feeling like I was mastering something, I felt overwhelmed.<br>I had a prepared Arch Linux ISO on a flash drive. I was seriously considering going back.<br>What I Was Missing (Kind Of)<br>The main thing pulling me back was not the complexity itself. Complexity I can deal with; I went through something similar when I first switched to Arch. It was something more subtle.<br>I missed the way I used to interact with my system.<br>On Arch, I had spent years building up a kind of physical intuition about Linux: knowing where configuration files live, understanding what they do, navigating the file system and editing things directly. That knowledge is universal across Unix systems that follow the FHS convention. It feels like real, transferable understanding. On NixOS, the need for most of it simply disappears. You do not go to /etc/resolv.conf to set your DNS; you declare it in a Nix file and NixOS generates the file for you. The abstraction handles it.<br>At first I found this liberating. After four weeks, I found it unsettling. I started to wonder whether I was actually learning Linux anymore, or just learning Nix. The two felt like different things, and I was not sure the latter was worth trading the former for.<br>I also worried that NixOS would limit my growth and understanding of the underlying system. On Arch, you had to do everything yourself, which meant learning where things are and why they are there. In NixOS, you learn how to interact with the system through the Nix abstraction, which distances you from the classical interaction model. I felt that distance after four weeks. I could do anything I wanted, but it felt less real somehow.<br>There is a genuine question lurking here, and I want to be honest about it rather than hand-wave it away.<br>Does abstracting away from the system prevent you from understanding it? One argument against abstraction is exactly that: it hides the thing it controls, and the knowledge you would have built by interacting with it directly never gets built. On the other hand, that same knowledge becomes partly irrelevant every few years as conventions shift. Does memorizing config file locations and doing things imperatively actually deepen understanding, or is it just familiarity with a particular set of conventions that will eventually change anyway, making the acquired knowledge irrelevant?<br>I cannot deny that the imperative model I used to deal with is responsible for building intuition and understanding about why things work the way they do, how they interact, and how and why they are related to each other.<br>And yet the question arises: do I need to know everything and manually track so many things, including small, relatively unimportant ones? It is useful in some ways, yet useless in others. There are things I do not want to spend my time on; I just want them to work. At the same time, I want to understand how and why they work. I do not want to live in ignorance of my precious tool, especially if I want to master it.<br>I did not have a clean answer. What I had was doubt, a flash drive, and the NixOS Discord server.<br>The Community<br>Rather than just switching back, I decided to post in the NixOS Discord server and hear what experienced users thought. I wrote out where I was:<br>Hello, I&rsquo;ve been using nix for 3 weeks, switched from arch which i had been using for 3.5 years.<br>Tbh, these 3 weeks have been amazing so far: learned a lot of stuff, which is nothing yet, but feels great anyway. After using a completely different approach to defining my system, i&rsquo;ve been both amazed and sad.<br>I feel sad because although the nix approach is cool, functional, atomic, defined state, do it one time and it works forever (ideally, if nothing changes in NixOS), yet this led me to less interaction with the system, almost at all, and just &ldquo;controlling&rdquo; it via nix files, and while definiteness and declarativeness is THE way imho; after discovering the nix way, the imperative approach seems as stupid as writing commands one by one instead of creating a reusable .sh file.<br>I just cannot see myself forgetting the stuff I have done and losing it, or fixing an issue and after reinstalling the system for whatever reason, and refixing the same thing again after...