4/23/2026 at 11:54:29 AM
It is nice to have this confidence.I ran Arch Linux for almost a year in WSL 2, it was really good.
Then I ran Arch natively for ~5 months, it's really good.
Now I still run Arch natively, but I also use the Arch Docker image to test my dotfiles[0] with a fresh file system.
Also, for when I want to run end to end tests for my dotfiles that set up a complete desktop environment I run Arch in a VM.
I have 99 problems but running Arch isn't one of them.
by nickjj
4/23/2026 at 6:26:18 PM
Do you have staged rollouts and rollbacks for dotfiles changes? Also do you support publishing Prometheus metrics and health probes for dotfiles? I have been looking for an enterprise ready dotfiles setup.by eddythompson80
4/23/2026 at 9:43:10 PM
I've used variations for the last ~10 years for a number of orgs. Some for 500+ million dollar companies with enterprise protocols and other smaller shops. Most were relatively small dev teams (< 30) where everyone upgraded at their own discretion. We never had an incident or a need to roll back.The apps developers were working on were running in Docker so all dependencies and things were handled in those projects, not the dotfiles. From a dotfiles perspective, we're talking about installing various packages and modifying either system or home dir config files, it wasn't complete device management. Device management was always handled by teams outside of our engineering team's control.
Keep in mind, it was a mixture of macOS and Windows with WSL 2. My dotfiles approach worked well, but I didn't use them directly since the companies I did work for didn't want to directly depend on my open source work but I used the same design principles and patterns.
No one used Arch in WSL 2 but for my own stuff if I need to lock a package I just use Mise instead of Arch's repo for that package. For example, this lets me have 3 different versions of Ansible available for different client work, same goes for terraform or kubectl, etc..
At one org, pre-Mise, I just rolled a tiny curl based solution that downloaded a release directly from GitHub, and we locked versions to what we wanted so we controlled upgrade cadence since it was important to keep a few CLI tools in sync.
I always tried to pick OS agnostic approaches so it all works on macOS and WSL 2 / native Linux (including CI). Whenever I rolled out these solutions for companies, it was always a thing to do on the side where I allocated maybe a week to come up with the solution, it wasn't my full time role to work on it. Just develop it and own the project for keeping it in a workable state or making ad hoc adjustments as needed. It never got to the point where things like Prometheus or health check metrics were thought about.
by nickjj
4/23/2026 at 10:56:37 PM
But are the dotfiles SOC-2 compliant?by SahAssar
4/24/2026 at 12:02:45 AM
I've worked at places that are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant with similar ways of installing tools on dev boxes. I would say yes but like anything SOC 2 related, "it depends". The compliance requirement is on the org being compliant.by nickjj
4/24/2026 at 10:11:03 AM
is this /s ? :Dby 8eios
4/23/2026 at 8:32:16 PM
Zero downtime dotfile rotation is still an unsolved problem AFAIKby edvinbesic
4/23/2026 at 8:36:28 PM
thanks for sharing and thanks for supporting other distros. I didn't know I needed this until now.by fhn
4/23/2026 at 10:10:03 PM
Sure, no problem. If you have any questions or issues let me know.> I didn't know I needed this until now.
Haha yeah I know the feeling. My main workstation is still a desktop computer I built in 2014, I do all of my dev work from it.
Around 8 years ago I thought to myself if I ever upgrade my hardware, it can't be a painful experience to set everything up again so I started the dotfiles project. That evolved into its current state.
I've always used rsync to back up my user files but I open sourced https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu recently which is based on a script from 2018 to make it more robust. Long story short, this fully handles offline backups and restores (and a side topic of syncing files between my desktop, laptop and phone). All is does it help you directly call rsync.
Between that and the dotfiles project, if my computer blew up tomorrow I'd be really upset for having to spend a lot of money on new parts but I could get everything up and running really quickly with zero dependence on cloud storage for any data.
by nickjj
4/23/2026 at 1:14:37 PM
Have you tried NixOS/flakes? What was your reaction?by MuffinFlavored
4/23/2026 at 1:27:23 PM
I haven't tried it first hand.I've written over ~10k lines of Ansible playbooks and roles to fully automate setting up servers to deploy Docker based web apps, so I do like the concept of declaring the state of a system in configuration and then having that become a reality. I know NixOS is not directly comparable to Ansible but in general I think IaC is a good idea.
It was important to me that my dotfiles work on a number of systems so I avoided NixOS. For example, the command line version works on Arch, Debian and Ubuntu based distros along with WSL 2 support and macOS too. The desktop version works on Arch and Arch based distros.
Beyond that, I also use my dotfiles on 2 different Linux systems so I wanted a way to differentiate certain configs for certain things. I also have a company issued laptop running macOS where I want everything to work, but it's a managed device so I can't go hog wild with full system level management.
Beyond that, since I make video courses I wanted to make it easy for anyone to replicate my set up if they wanted but also make it super easy for them to personalize any part of the set up without forking my repo (but they can still fork it if they want).
All of the above was achievable with shell scripts and symlinks. I might be wrong since I didn't research it in depth but I'm not sure NixOS can handle all of the above use cases in an easy to configure manner.
by nickjj
4/23/2026 at 2:40:50 PM
To have your Nix-based setup reproducible across different OS (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, WSL2, MacOS, and NixOS), and have an extensible base config that can be customized to different situations, the go-to framework is home-manager (not NixOS, which only works on NixOS, or NixOS on WSL 2).by one-punch
4/23/2026 at 3:46:56 PM
Nix offers a trade-off: near-perfect reproducibility in exchange for longer builds. Sometimes it's nice to just build a new .so for some library and let the rest of your binaries link to it without recompiling everything.I'm not convinced about building whole systems around it. I can't remember the last time I ran into a reproducibility issue in practice, but I upgrade my system packages every day and that's definitely faster without Nix.
by bloppe
4/23/2026 at 9:11:12 PM
ABI stability exists for a reason.by snovv_crash
4/23/2026 at 1:17:52 PM
I have never been more stress-free than when I was running nixos as a daily driver. Had to return to macos as primary unfortunately but still use nix as much as possible.by srik
4/23/2026 at 6:07:21 PM
I am even so stress-free, that I once rebuilt my kernel (including simple patches) under the hood of my daily production/home pc.edit: Using nixos ofc, otherwise I would never do this.
by luz666
4/23/2026 at 4:20:57 PM
Migrated from archlinux to nixos. I don't think I can use anything else now...I have a CI at home that builds my nixos config on a weekly basis with the latest flake. The artifacts are pushed to atticd. With this setup, when I actually need to update my machines, its almost instantaneous.
by thisisthenewme
4/23/2026 at 7:18:49 PM
Care to share some scripts on how you do it? I'm in similar position, maintaining multiple desktops, laptops, servers, but i do not know how to share the build artifacts.by stratosgear
4/24/2026 at 1:04:39 AM
Agreed. I'm at same point in my Nix journey and would like to share build artifacts.by hodgesd