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The original was posted on /r/nixos by /u/estrafire on 2024-09-24 17:34:55+00:00.

Sorry to post a question that’s been asked million of times using the search it seems that it’s asked at least once a month, the thing is, I’ve noticed that the replies vary a lot between posts and that the only constant is the documentation situation.

I’m not a hardcore user, I’ve been solely on Linux for half a decade. I mostly use my system for work (software development) and gaming.

As someone who tries to isolate dependencies from the system (and have multiple versions in some situations), the parallel envs and declarative approach caught my eye, I mean, which other distro allows you to seamlessly switch between DEs without leaving residual packages in the way while still having system access -a recent situation I’ve dealt with was Zypper not having direct ways to remove orphaned dependencies-?

I’d use it the same way as any other distro, replacing asdf with a persistent user-env for software like IDEs, prioritizing the usage of Flatpaks, Distrobox and Devcontainers when I need some sort of isolation or want to use an officially distributed bundle, I want to be able to switch between DEs without cluttering everything, which I guess should be possible by having a separate config for each, and is part of the reason I wouldn’t go with immutable distros.

The issue is, I don’t know where to start, I’d like to start on a VM from a solid starting point (I also wanted to try Hyprland but it seems it doesn’t work on a VM), so any pointers on how to start/approach it and common pitfalls would be greatly appreciated. I’ve also read between this kind of posts (sorry for creating a new one) that some people had issues with Distrobox while others said that it worked just fine, not sure if it was an old issue or user error. Are there situations that can’t be solved due to the Nix structure? How often do situations like this happened to you that didn’t have workarounds?

Thanks everyone