NixOS Made Me Lose My Wife

NixOS made me lose my wife I thought it was just installing a Linux distro. "Try NixOS," they said. "It's not just an OS, it's a way of life." Even my wife was supportive: "Didn't you say you wanted more control over your system?" That was the last time she looked at me with hope. I didn't choose Ubuntu or Fedora like a sane person. No, I chose NixOS — as if I wanted to watch my marriage collapse in real-time. The first day, I spent 12 hours writing a configuration.nix just to get Wi-Fi working. When my wife brought dinner, I waved her off: "I'm just setting up a declarative Bluetooth module, it'll only take a minute..." She asked if we could go hiking over the weekend. "Sure," I said, "right after I finish setting up home-manager and figuring out why my shell isn't reproducible." That was three weeks ago. She tried everything to pull me out. "Let's go for a coffee," she said. "Sorry, I'm debugging why my system rebuild keeps pulling a different glibc version." "Maybe just watch a movie together?" "Good idea! First I need to package mpv myself, I don't trust the default derivation..." Then came the final blow: One night, she found me at 3 a.m., half-naked, whispering into the void: "If I can just get this flake to build... I can declare our entire marriage in a flake.nix..." She stared at me — a broken man surrounded by YAML, JSON, and cryptic build errors. "I married a person, not a package manager." she said. She left a sticky note on the monitor: "I'm going to find someone who just uses Arch. They might be unstable, but at least they notice when I'm in the room." I still wonder... Can I nixos-rebuild switch into a timeline where she stayed?

A Reddit text post tells a satirical story about a man becoming so obsessed with configuring NixOS that he neglects his wife and loses his marriage. The punchline uses NixOS terminology—flakes, declarative configuration, reproducible shells, home-manager, and nixos-rebuild—as metaphors for emotional dysfunction and treating a relationship like a software project. It is shared as a reaction to obsessive Linux tinkering, overengineering, or choosing an impractical technical hobby over real life.

• @gentoomemes / 17117 2025-05-01