Well, you can roll back with a switch too; no reboot required.
The VM protects you from accidental state modification however (i.e. programs enabled by some DE by default writing their config files everwhere) and its ephemeral nature makes a few things easier.
There is none. NTFS is a filesystem you should only use if you need Windows compatibility anyways. Eventhough Linux natively supports it these days, it’s still primarily a windows filesystem.
I dont want weird archives or anything, just to copy my filesystem to another drive.
For proper backups, you do want “weird archives” with integrity checks, versioning, deduplication and compression. Regular files cannot offer that (at least not efficiently so).
Make sure that device doesn’t require proprietary drivers (commonly WiFi or GPU). If the hardware in question needs those and you need the component to work, I wouldn’t take it for free because you’d be stuck with shitty support on an ancient kernel.
Most commonly, thio affects broadcom WiFi and Nvidia GPUs.
Minor version bumps should be mostly trivial: Change version and hash, package that into commit+PR (ckeck guidelines on that!) and that’s it most of the time.
The harder part is QA; ensuring it still works as expected. Therefore, even just testing update PRs as they come in would be a great help.
If the code change is trivial and a user of the package said it still works for them, a commiter coming along is likely convinced of the PR’s quality and just merges it.
It’s super easy to contribute to Nixpkgs in a meaningful manner :)