Five years on NixOS

August 2, 2026

Another yer, another instance of my NixOS journey log (2025 instance).

System maintenance

As usual I don’t remember what I did to my system over the past year, so I’m at the git log for /etc/nixos as it contains all the changes:

I had to switch nix GC job from monthly runs to weekly runs: a month is enough to generate so much garbage that individual GC runs are too painful.
follow rename of linuxPackages.perf -> perf
temporary revert to older nix to avoid CA-derivation regression
follow services.resolved.extraConfig -> services.resolved.settings move
temporary revert to older nix to avoid another CA-derivation regression
adapt to 'xorg.xrdb' has been renamed to 'xrdb'
adapt to wineWowPackages -> wineWow64Packages deprecation
temporary revert to older nix to avoid yet another CA-derivation regression
try out niri and zellij
temporary revert to older nix to avoid one more CA-derivation regression
added a kernel range exclusion hack for my broken RAM after motherboard switch

On nixpkgs side it was pleasantly low on churn. But nix managed to break ca-derivations a lot. Even now it’s barely usable with unevictable partial traces for unstable derivations. I have to patch derivations manually time to time to get past broken partial states.

I had some fun trying out new packages like niri and zellij. Using both now.

Annoyingly I have a single bit flip in my RAM. Luckily I managed to yank 4K page out of usable space to avoid problems. I know for sure that it occasionally caused build failures and broke files freshly written on disk.

On top of that my motherboard died this year. After plugging in a replacement I had to adjust 4K hack for RAM as it’s physical location moved.

I managed to report a few fun problems to various upstream packages:

chromium stopped detecting video acceleration on sway on amd card for me: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/446395287. I had a deja vu with a similar bug in wine. Both were fixed promptly /
binutils ld was very slow at handling thousands of input sections and manifested as a slow linkage for ghc binaries. Was fixed quickly.

Community support

I still feel that NixOS community is a welcoming place for newcomers, experimenters and people who do grunt maintenance work.

This year I managed to get about 450 commits into nixpkgs, half the size of last years’ values.

I can barely keep up with new topics on https://discourse.nixos.org/.

Home server experience

I did not have to adapt anything for the past year. Things still Just Work.

Local experiments

I switched to zellij terminal multiplexer and to niri wayland compositor. I’m happy with both.

I continued gcc testing. This year it was gcc-16 branch. nixpkgs still manages to serve as a reasonable vehicle to find bugs. This year I found about 30 compiler bugs. About the half of past year. Did not manage to fix any myself.

Parting words

NixOS still works for me. I feel like I had a lot of issues with CA-derivations and minimal bootstrap pain. If those keep getting in the way of using the system I’ll have to investigate the alternatives.