Well to be fair I think it’s because they aren’t trying to be NixOS. You could leverage those arguments against any distro that’s trying out an immutable flavor. Which is mostly accomplished through btrfs features.
I agree that Nix/NixOS does a lot more and it’s a genuinely impressive and paradigm shifting project but it does break with traditional Linux layouts and thinking in a way that immutability doesn’t necessarily have to do.
You could also make the same argument with the systemd and non-systemd crowd.
Either way I look forward to the future of both immutability projects and NixOS. I feel like both areas still need a bit of work but they’re both really exciting fields.
I feel like I keep posting this everywhere but there’s a project called AstOS that attempts this. Also someone clued me in on this distro neutral solution. AshOS. Full disclosure I haven’t used either.
YMMV based on distro. IIRC OpenSUSE has upgrade “pathing” to reduce conflicts during long delays between updates. Geckolinux has an iso released 6 months ago and it will update to the latest OpenSUSE packages.
I honestly think Arch could handle 3 months as well as long as you update the keyring and read the update news from Arch.
NixOS rolling wouldn’t give a damn but that’s not really fair since it basically rebuilds the whole system :P
The biggest issue is not getting security updates for 3 months.
Just keep breaking stuff! It means your learning and trying new things, for the most part. Eventually you’ll just break stuff less and less or know what to look for when something breaks. On that note do try to struggle with something a little bit before rolling back or reinstalling.