I'm using NixOS "latest" on my workstation, for no particularly good reason.

One success I had was with building up a custom vim setup. I had previously been using Lunar and Astro as an opionated vim distro with LSP+Treesitter and some other "table stakes" things a modern editor should have. But there wasn't a clear way to install Astro in NixOS when I tried it manually. So I just told Claude Code what plugins and settings I wanted in neovim, and now I have a single file that fully describes my vim setup. Before with Astro and Lunar the configs were spread out all over a bunch of files.

I was also able to get Claude Code to bundle up gitbutler-cli, which I wanted to try but so far have not. It builds it from source because there was no existing derivation. It takes a stunningly long time to build, but otherwise it has worked very well in my simple testing of it. Plus, I can build on my powerful laptop and then use that to seed my old, slow ThinkPad T470s and even slower chromebook that I also put my config on.

For example: you have a background program that you're not using and in the foreground you're crunching data from disk. In this scenario the most efficient use of your memory is to swap the background program out and pull the disk data into RAM.

Shuffling out 8GB with a spinning hard drive could take a full minute…

That said, I agree with you. I’d rather not use swap unless absolutely necessary and I don’t want the latter to happen either…

Plus, I don’t want my storage in the “critical path” of memory accesses, even if rare.

> filesystem - must be only single device

> This means swapfiles will have an amplified impact, much larger than the size of the swapfile itself.

> Users should be aware of the impact when using swapfiles alongside other data. This is especially discouraged for root filesystem.

If a swap file is the only thing that will work with your setup, then it's fine to use one, but if you're at all able to use a swap partition, then that's a far better choice. (Swap files are fine on ext4 and xfs; it's only COW filesystems like btrfs and zfs where they should be avoided.)