I’ve been here a week ago already asking if Arch would be fine for a laptop used for university, as stability is a notable factor in that and I’m already using EndeavourOS at home, but now I’m curious about something else too - what about Arch vs NixOS?
I heard that NixOS is pretty solid, as due to the one file for your entire system format you can both copy and restore your system easily whenever, apart from your normal files and application configurations of course.
Are there any major downsides to NixOS compared to Arch apart from the Arch Wiki being a bit less relevant? I’d also lose access to the AUR, but admittedly I don’t think I’ve ever actually needed it for anything, it’s just nice to have. Also, since NixOS has both rolling release and static release and you can mix and match if you wanna get packages from unstable or not, I’m not losing Arch’s bleeding edge, which is nice.
The killer feature is declarative system management. Reproducible systems is just one of the resulting properties. You want to just try out KDE for a week coming from gnome? Good luck getting rid of all the bloat when switching back on arch. You want to run a program once but not necessarily have it installed on your system? You can do that with nixos. You messed something up and your system now doesn’t boot? You can go back to a previous iteration with nixos, no need to find your liveUSB to start messing with chrooting and stuff. Ever find yourself asking where the configuration file for is so you can edit it? The answer is /etc/configuration.nix Ever had to merge older configs with newer ones because the software updated? (If no, you haven’t been using arch for long) why would you need to do that? You declaratively specified how you want your system to behave and nixos will figure out how to translate that to the new config.
And that’s just the “killer” features I use on a day to day basis