As per title, I am mind-blown by the speed and stability of NixOS on this "relic" in IT terms... On this machine i tested:
| Distro | Performance |
|---|---|
| Fedora | MEGA slow |
| Ubuntu | OKish |
| LDME | Fast |
| Debian | Fast |
| NixOS | VERY Fast |
And the best thing is that I can bring this config with me on any computer! Oh boy, I think i have fallen in love with NixOS
It was updated before wiping yes. Those macs are abandonware, they stopped receiving firmware update a while ago. Followed no guide, the install wizard was very easy. All components worked out of the box
Sorry for reviving an old post, but I just came across this. I also have a 2012 MacBook Air and was planning to put NixOS on it. Did the sound, Bluetooth and WiFi work out of the box too? Thanks!
How is fedora that slow? Is it due to btrfs? Is tracker running in the background?
Excellent.
It is readily accepted that Linux reduces overhead versus Windows on the same system.
What is less readily accepted is the same result versus macOS. Yes, it is considerably more work to get Linux running well on a Mac, since it is ultimately a closed ecosystem. But the point should be made that macOS also has a lot of unnecessary overhead over which the user has little or no control.
The PC vs Mac thing should be dead by now, tbh, in favor of corporate vs FOSS.
Yet not as easy as loading it on a PC, which was my only point there.
I haven't done extensive testing, but I never had any issues installing Linux on my 2012 and 2013 macbook pros. Same exact process.
Once you are comfy with base configs. Simple flakes become a dream simplifying your configs especially helpful when your using nix on more than one computer.
Vimjoyer on youtube has a bunch of vids that really helps and he keeps it simple.
I've ran both pop_os and nixos on the same laptop, albeit a newer laptop, and they felt the same to me performance wise. My experience is that if they're using the same kernel, same init system, same desktop env, etc they'll prob feel the same
Thank you. Will try NixOS on a desktop soon. Speed is also very much related to the kernel, so you may want to compare kernels, too. I.e. Debian standard, Liquorix, Debian realtime, MX AHS, etc. I figured the rt kernel generally performs best for non-dGPU systems. And also the WM: KDE is unbearable for me, really slow on old thinkpads, while with XFCE everything is blazing fast.
The kernel is one of the least important components when it comes to performance.
Kernel tweaks can eek out a couple percent here or there for your specific task (while likely regressing in others) but nothing really significant.
FWIW though, we have lqx and rt variants in NixOS (though rt is mainline now with 6.12).
Generally yes.
Here is two examples from my recent experience:
I will look into nixOS definitely. Last time I checked must have been 2018 hehe
Right if you have applications with rt constraints, you'll obviously need a rt-capable OS but that's more a matter of it being available as a feature, rather than being performant enough.
Would nixos work on their M4 minis?
@Loucypher hey ! are you using zen browser flatpak??
go to feed...
go to feed...
Did you leave a MacOS partition for firmware upgrades, or just make sure it was fully updated before wiping?
Does all the hardware work? Which guide did you use for prep and install?
save