The list of things I miss from other operating systems is very small at this point. There are so many good open source projects.
For software development, my NixOS environment is Nirvana.
Valve has put the Linux gaming community on their back, and now many games are running better in Proton than on their native OS.
For artistic stuff, there are a lot of good open source options, but many industry standard tools do not support Linux.
If I had to choose something, I wish Cubase or other industry standard DAWs would support Linux.
I suppose we also miss out on some industry standard scientific software like SolidWorks.
Or maybe there is some tool that doesn’t exist anywhere yet. What do you think?
for NixOS in particular I’d be willing to recommend it to my friends (as we’re all software devs) if the documentation could be on par if not better than Archlinux’s wiki
I’m still using NixOS atm as it works well with my laptop but I might switch back as there are still things that I can’t do as easily as when I was on Arch. Like figuring out error codes and making boot level modifications on Arch was top notch! On NixOS I basically have to hope that the official repo has in-line comments or some snippets that I can gleem from. Otherwise I’m having to search through several hundreds of configs and flakes to see if anyone’s fixed or has encountered the same issues that I’ve stumbled onto.
NixOS is real stable on X11, Wayland, and Hyprland. It just needs a bit more documentation to entice more skilled users to recursively make everything else better cause then everyone wins.
I completely agree about NixOS docs. On top of that, Nix is a pretty challenging language to read at times. Even with the Nil language server, I can’t do basic things like get return type annotations or tag to symbols outside my own workspace. And so I rely a lot on community examples before resorting to reading NixOS/nixpkgs source code.
Even with those obstacles, I still find NixOS to be the best option, because I have a config that does everything I need already, and I can experiment with confidence that it won’t break.