[foopdoopfoop]

> As a keen NixOS user/contributor, if your only needs are i3 and Firefox, then I do not recommend NixOS to you. ~Any distribution can meet your needs.

I really disagree with this. NixOS is also great for simple use cases like this because it's robust. I know a lot of people who switched to Linux, need to get something to work, follow some online tutorial/directions blindly, and just break shit pretty badly.

This isn't contrived: even seemingly-inoculous commands like "pacman -Sy" on Manjaro/Arch can fuck your shit up (it basically amounts to a partial upgrade).

NixOS doesn't let you break shit like this. (Literally, upgrades are atomic and packages can never have missing dependencies.) And, even if somehow you did, you then have a nice configuration.nix to quickly get back up to speed.

[aastronaut]

Unfortunately I have to disagree.

I tried to setup a simple NixOS machine this week. From this experience I couldn't manage to install any GNOME extensions via the browser plugin because of some Firefox manifest location that conflicts with the way the NixOS store handles it - there is some workaround in some tickets, but it made me wonder how many other applications are in need for specific workarounds. I then enabled flatpak via the OS configuration, but the first installed app couldn't launch because of some obscure error with gstreamer. I changed to fedora and could setup anything without any of those issues.

I really want to like NixOS (I still do), but I now consider it more for a server environment than a casual desktop environment.

[microtonal]

You can use NixOS on the desktop -- it has a lot of benefit (including atomic upgrades/rollbacks). But it only really works well if you manage everything through Nix. Other mechanisms such as the ones that you mention tend to break very often.

I just gave up using Flatpaks with NixOS and install GNOME extensions through Nix.

[eeh]

Sure, but Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora all provide great experiences for "I just want some packages installed".

Fedora nowadays has btrfs-level rollbacks, which although this doesn't interact well with cfgmgmt (unlike NixOS's excellent rollback support), it's perfectly fine for an end user.

[microtonal]

This is a benefit, but other distributions are catching up. For example, Fedora Silverblue has an immutable root filesystem and provides atomic upgrades/rollbacks through OSTree. Ubuntu 20.04 supports making ZFS snapshots as an APT pre-installation hook and thus also support rollbacks.

[pkulak]

And don't forget OpenSUSE, which has been making btrfs snapshots before and after every upgrade for years(?) now. OpenSUSE doesn't seem to ever get the recognition it deserves.