When was that? I think I had stuff like this when first looking into Arch ~8 years ago. It's now been my daily driver for about 6 years, and I haven't had my system bricked. I have had a few updates that broke stuff, which could be solved through a downgrade, but no bricking.
So maybe the Arch maintainers got more disciplined, or maybe I just got better at not breaking things. Probably both.
OK, but I still want an answer to my question -- to help me decide what distro to choose for personal use.
(I already get that the design of NixOS prevents the system's ending up in an incoherent state, which will happen on Arch eventually if you wait long enough between upgrades.)
I've developed packages for ABS before, and it's nice. What nix's model gets you is (a) largely avoiding complex bash scripts, and (b) a pile of tools for working with packages that you don't want to install semi-irreversibly. nix-shell, for example, will put you in a shell inside the build environment, and you can run the build steps yourself and see what the outcomes are. nix-build will build a piece of software and create a symlink to the output, but not install it into your user's package namespace.
One of the nice things is that you can install many things without having to sudo - the build is run by a daemon and sandboxed. nix-shell can also be used to create a shell in which a given package set is installed - you can use that to use a piece of software as a one-off or create a development environment that doesn't pollute your general system. Tools like home-manager[0] can help with managing your home directory in a similar way to NixOS's management of your system, too - I have redis and postgres installed using home-manager to run as my own user on demand under systemctl.
- No separate AUR that some packages are arbitrarily located in
- Not having to care about binary packages: they are just transparently downloaded and used if available
Pacaur makes the AUR a bit more palatable, but you still notice the split.