FOSSMeet'26

NOTE: This talk will be a more refined and in-depth version of the talk present at Kochi FOSS Meetup: https://youtu.be/3o2V9BmeoYw?t=2999

I broke my Fedora install. Ran some random script to set up Hyprland, it scattered files everywhere, and there was no clean way to get it out. So I nuked it and tried NixOS instead.

Turns out, NixOS is kind of insane. Your whole system (packages, services, desktop, kernel config) lives in one file. You change it, rebuild, and if you mess up, you just roll back. That’s it. No reinstalling, no debugging what broke, just boot into the previous generation.

Once you get used to this, every other distro starts feeling ancient and chaotic. Manually installing packages, praying config changes don’t break something, having no real way to undo things. You can’t unsee it.

I’ve been daily-driving NixOS since, across multiple machines, and I’m not going back. In this talk I’ll cover:

• What Nix is (the package manager and the language) and why it thinks about software differently from everything else
• How NixOS builds on top of that to give you a fully declarative, reproducible OS
• What my setup looks like: multi-machine config, Hyprland, dev environments, all in one Git repo
• The sharp edges, because the learning curve is real and nobody talks about it enough