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 man becomes so obsessed with configuring NixOS that he neglects his wife, spending all his time debugging declarative system setups, package derivations, and reproducible builds. The punchline compares relationship problems to NixOS commands and configuration files, ending with the hope that he can rebuild reality with nixos-rebuild. It is used as a reaction to extreme Linux enthusiast behavior, especially overengineering and losing perspective while customizing a system.

• @gentoomemes / 17117 2025-05-01
• @dev_meme / 6752 2025-05-16