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.

  •  hallettj   ( @hallettj@beehaw.org ) English
    3•7 months ago

    I want to make a small correction - this is not true:

    iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

    nixos-rebuild behaves like most package managers: it makes new packages available immediately, and restarts relevant systemd services. Like other distros you have to reboot to run a new kernel.

    And cleaning up Steam games is as issue with most distros too. But I kinda see your point.

    Btw Nix (both NixOS and the Nix package manager running in other distros) has this feature where you can run packages without “installing” them if you just want to run them once:

    $ nix shell nixpkgs#package-name

    That puts you in a shell with one or more packages temporarily installed. The packages are downloaded to /nix/store/ as usual, but will get garbage-collected sometime after you close the shell.