I’ve run NixOS on my 2024 Zephyrus G14 for a while now, and I wanted to share my experience the good, the quirks, and why I enjoy it so much.
When I first installed NixOS, I began with KDE. But eventually, I switched to GNOME. Theoretically, KDE was great; but I battled through a number of issues with Wi-Fi out of the box. It made setting up the config on new devices such a pain. GNOME fits my workflow way better, and it just “works” on this laptop.
One thing I’ve deliberately avoided is Home Manager. I like to set up my environment manually each time I spin up a new system. This means my configs aren’t always identical, but it gives me the flexibility to experiment and improve my setup each time.
Even with that manual approach, I absolutely love the Nix package manager. Declarative system management is a huge win it makes installing, updating, and rolling back packages predictable and clean.
Actually, my Linux journey started with Arch, which was a really great learning experience. I got to understand package management, the filesystem, and general Linux behavior in depth. However, it wasn’t until switching to NixOS that I realized how much I value declarative configs. Being able to define my system in code and reproduce it exactly or tweak it intentionally, is an incredible feeling.
If you want to check out my full NixOS setup, it’s available on my GitHub here: https://github.com/dyl-tech/nixos-config
For reference, here’s a snapshot of my current setup via fastfetch:
dyl@nixos
---------
OS: NixOS 25.11 (Xantusia) x86_64
Host: ROG Zephyrus G14 GA403UI_GA403UI (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 6.17.6
Uptime: 2 hours, 52 mins
Packages: 1748 (nix-system), 5 (nix-user), 18 (flatpak)
Shell: fish 4.1.2
Display (Acer Technologies 24"): 1920x1080 in 24", 60 Hz [External]
DE: GNOME 48.4
WM: Mutter (Wayland)
WM Theme: Gruvbox-Dark
Theme: Gruvbox-Dark [GTK2/3/4]
Icons: Papirus-Dark [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Adwaita Sans (11pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: Simp1e-Adw-Dark (24px)
Terminal: kitty 0.43.1
Terminal Font: DejaVuSansMono (11pt)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS (16) @ 5.26 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Max-Q / Mobile [Discrete]
GPU 2: AMD Radeon 780M Graphics [Integrated]
Memory: 15.06 GiB / 30.64 GiB (49%)
Swap: 0 B / 32.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 290.06 GiB / 936.83 GiB (31%) - ext4
Disk (/run/media/dyl/Data_01): 93.70 GiB / 1.79 TiB (5%) - ext4
Battery (A32-K55): 80% [AC Connected]
Locale: en_US.UTF-8