Maybe things have changed since I’ve last tried it (10 years or so), but I thought Fedora Rawhide was at the most bleeding edge of experimental packages.
It Broke far to many times, I used Arch Linux for about 5 years or longer, systemd fixed a lot of stuff, and some of the other changes, but i needed a more production stable system.
I use ZFS Bootmenu with Debian Stable+flatpak and some backports these days and so for i only broke my system once.
I’m not blaming Arch it’s a meme, you don’t have to get mad about it.
I have broken or had the OS shit the bed with Android, DOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Mint, SUSE, Redhat Linux, Mac OSX, IOS, and many copy’s of Windows in my years. mostly with Windows it just shits the bed, you don’t even have to try, Mac OS 7/8/9 use to love shitting the bed as well.
I use to boot to Fedora, Mint, or Windows as well, mostly as backups (I used Linux for over 20 years) but I used Arch mainly as my Gaming OS, but i did some Dev on Arch as well, Arch is good long as stuff is not broken, it use to be if you installed a lot of packages, Arch was happy to break on you, now with flatpak that is not so much the case like it use to be, Arch is getting better thanks to upstream dev’s taking away all the wiring we had to do over the years down stream.
Arch with Bcachefs and Flatpak + pipeware and KDE Wayland is looking good to me, when Bcachefs is ready maybe with Kernel 7.0? next year i may try Arch once more.
After hearing about their “totally riced” setup for hours, the exhausted predator dies a painless death in the icy waters. A mercy the breedable Rust peers of the Arch user, drunk on their freshly claimed victory, will not share. Already displaying socks as part of their mating ritual, no baby-faced creature that knows its way around a terminal is safe. They are not taken by force however. Rather they freeze, smitten by the confidence the incredibly annoying apex predator radiates. Feeling used, but also strangely satisfied, the confused boy is left wondering why they aren’t using Arch, when Wiki and the AUR are so incredibly useful. Maybe it’s that symbiosis that keeps them together: Curiosity, Fear and the common Arch user’s incredible displays of power.
That’s just a snapshot. What NixOS allows you to create configuration that will deploy your OS configured the way you like, possibly post it on places like GitHub deeply a new machine confused the exact same way.
BTRFS and ZFS filesystems offer lightweight snapshots. So you can save the state of the filesystem and restore it. It is often integrated with the package manager and a snapshot is involved before you make change.
NixOS works differently. You have a configuration file, and each time you make change to it NixOS rebuilds itself to its specification from scratch (you might assume it would be a lengthy process, but because of caching only things that are rebuilt are things that you are changing).
This means that things like for example squeezing from KDE to Gnome or X11 to Wayland aren’t scary to try and you can easily revert things back, your home directory won’t be touched.
Also those things aren’t exclusive you can use BTRFS and ZFS on NixOS to and enjoy their benefits.
Yeah, you can if you plan well enough (typically. What I’m trying to illustrate is that this works by taking a snapshot of the disk in time. It’s like keeping a working copy of your system on your disk to be able to revert to.
While with NixOS you work with a “recipe” how your system is supposed to be configured. It is much lighter. It is declarative, you change the recipe and get what you described, you change configuration and all packages which you did not mention and are not used by anything are gone. If you update your system you can use the same configuration on it
The thing is that using can still get BTRFS or ZFS and use it to have snapshots too (for example your home directory)
Nah man, 3 months ago i had fedora 38 btrfs, timeshift refused to work because subvolumes wasn’t done, but i installed everything in auto gui mode, i did them by the manual after installation, timeshift started working just fine, a week further update to fedora 39 came, i updated, everything broke because of subvolumes, i loaded fedora recovery mode from grub, tried to roll back with timeshift btrfs, it rolled back to 38 but everything was still broke, and more over, whole ssd with this installation became locked, had to recover data from completely locked up ssd, in the middle of the process it locked even further, so i couldn’t even copy some files when disk was connected as external
NixOS ended up disappointing me a fair bit. I just tried it recently and the KDE support seems very rough so far, or at least I couldn’t find good answers to how to configure it and theme it.
One of the main draw of NixOs is the reproducibility of builds, meaning that redoing the build will provide the exact same output each time, so Nix encourages you to make configuration changes through the package manager. I’ve mostly overcome my theming woes with home-manager now, but this comment was speaking to a little wrinkle I had when I was trying to learn and take advantage of the OS’s features as best I could.
The main configuration handles configuration of the system, home manager project was created to bring similar functionality for the user home directory. That’s where the name comes from.
Home manager also works great when using Nix on other systems to manage for files, for example on OS X.
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