NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution Hey, glad you found this blog —
it’s a good one. Let me start with a quick story about how I discovered this
absolute banger of a distro.
Back in college, we had a Linux course. Around that time, one of my classmates told me to dual boot Linux. At first, I had no clue what “dual boot” even meant. I Googled it and figured out that it just means running two operating systems on one machine.
So I started watching YouTube videos on “How to dual boot Linux,” and stumbled upon one that explained how the whole dual boot process works. Then came the big question: which distro to use?
I already knew Linux had a ton of distributions, and eventually I landed on “Arch Linux.” Yes, I tried to install Arch on my first attempt at dual booting. (Crazy, I know.)
After failing three times, I finally managed to install Arch Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop on my fourth try. It worked, but… there was a catch — my system kept freezing after a while. I hit the web trying to debug the issue, but nothing really solved it.
During that desperate web search phase, I stumbled upon something called NixOS.
I dual booted it, started using it, and instantly fell in love with the idea: an immutable, declarative distro where everything is configured in just one file. You can roll back, rebuild, and do anything you want — with full control and reproducibility.
That was the beginning of my journey with NixOS.
Later, I came across the original paper: 📄 NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution
Turns out, NixOS is based on the PhD thesis of Eelco Dolstra, titled: 📘 The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model 👉 Read it here
Let me break it down:
Eelco’s thesis = Nix Nix = NixOS NixOS = 💥 declarative Linux on steroids And that’s how I ended up here — writing this post on a fully configured, declaratively managed, roll-backable beast of a system.
Stay tuned, there’s more coming — deep dives, config tips, and lessons learned.