For a few months I couldn’t find the time (or the energy) to keep working on my plan to migrate to NixOS as my primary OS for personal use but, because there’s always a “but”, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, over the last two months I finally made the jump.

And it turned out to be far less painful than I expected, both on the operating system side and on the desktop stack (display manager / window manager). If you’ve never tried it, I strongly recommend giving a tiling window manager a fair shot: the learning curve is lower than it looks, and the day-to-day productivity gains are immediate once the muscle memory kicks in.

What changed in my configuration

Completing the migration naturally pushed me to revisit my baseline configuration and clean it up:

  • I refactored and reorganized a few core configuration files.
  • I added services I had forgotten about, plus a couple I realized I still need on a daily basis.
  • I kept the overall approach simple and reproducible (that remains the point of the whole exercise).

Release notes: where I am now, and what’s next

At the time of writing, NixOS 25.11 is the latest stable release (released on November 30, 2025). Meanwhile, NixOS 25.05 is still working well for me and has been stable but it is close to its end-of-life (EOL), which is December 31, 2025 according to the official release announcement.

Time permitting, I’ll upgrade soon; for now, I’m prioritizing stability while I keep iterating on the configuration.

Repository

If you’re interested, here is the template repository I maintain:

Another NixOS Configurations Template https://github.com/palumbou/another_nixos_configurations_template

Thanks for reading!