If you're not willing to install a whole new OS, nix , the package manager of nixos, is standalone and can be run in a single user without interferring with system packages. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with the system. [0]<p>I use Nix together with ArchLinux now to set up consistent development environments and it has been great. It's also blazingly fast because of Hydra[1], their continious build system.<p>[0] <a href="http://nixos.org/nix" rel="nofollow">http://nixos.org/nix</a>
[1] <a href="http://nixos.org/hydra" rel="nofollow">http://nixos.org/hydra</a>
Many may wonder like me WTF is NixOS?<p>The key feature is 'declarative system configuration'. Sort of Puppet/Chef/Ansible/CFengine build-in. Heavily oriented on DevOPs culture.<p>The OS allows you to test package installs without the fear of breaking the system. You can always roll back to a previous known-good state.
A list of changes: <a href="http://hydra.nixos.org/build/18399157/download/2/nixos/sec-release-14.12.html" rel="nofollow">http://hydra.nixos.org/build/18399157/download/2/nixos/sec-r...</a>
While nix the package manager is obviously the main point of interest in NixOS, could somebody who has actually used NixOS comment on other aspects of it. How's the packaging of software, does NixOS try to follow upstream as closely as possible, or do they push towards some other direction? Do they eg. aim to provide some sensible default configurations or do they expect people to do their own thing? How is the software selection in the repositories, are there lots of packages missing or out-of-date? And so on..
Congrats to the Nix team! A lot of new packages in this release.<p>See also: GNU Guix, based on Nix. <a href="https://gnu.org/s/guix" rel="nofollow">https://gnu.org/s/guix</a>