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The original was posted on /r/nixos by /u/yuken123 on 2024-09-18 08:58:54+00:00.

I switched Nixos a few months ago when a freeze during a full system upgrade on another distro led to the system breaking. It took a lot of getting used to using the system and the language, especially as I’ve been trying to get into some more complex configs or package my own software. But overall, things worked and I have been satisfied. Plus I dont have to worry about the system freezing during updates, as even if worse comes to worst I can still just reinstall.

Fast forward to a week ago, I bought a new laptop and wanted to try out wayland on my new computer, and the experience was both satisfying and frustrating.

On one hand, switching back to x11 if something didn’t work out in wayland was super easy, just switch a generation. Trying out different compositors was the same, a few options and it was there. i didn’t have to worry about breaking my current setups or accidentally leaving random unnecessary packages on the system. On any other distro, i probably wouldn’t have dared to jump to a different wm so quick.

On the other hand, the magic of nixos configurations were also a pain to debug through. Polkit didn’t work in the beginning seemingly due to me enabling thunar, and then it refused to work well with gtk for some reason. Fcitx5 took an embarrassingly long time to debug, because for some of the tools it defaults to the nix store without addons and deletes your configs. Trying out conditional configurations led to repeated infinite recursions that appears if I put the config in one file and disappears in another.

And through all the debugging, there was so little information i got from documentation, most of it was from other people’s questions or random blog posts.

Or maybe, this is just wayland problems/s