[jaemoe]

The issue wasn't the system broke, in fact, my system was doing pretty much alright.

The problem was: in the AUR, lots of packages didn't built or launch, and even in the official repos, some packages were missing libraries or just not having the right versions.

I was tired of tinkering to get everything to work as I wanted.

[microtonal]

The problem was: in the AUR, lots of packages didn't built or launch,

I used Arch for a while before NixOS. Another problem I encountered with the AUR is that, since the AUR is not built as a single consistent system with Arch itself, often packages from AUR would start failing because some library was upgraded in Arch and the newer version was ABI-incompatible with the version that the AUR package was compiled with.

[mehrdadn]

Out of curiosity what do you think of how Arch and NixOS compare to Debian or Ubuntu? (I'm asking to help me calibrate against what you're saying since I've used all of these except NixOS.)

[jsjohnst]

Imho, Arch is a similar style to Debian/Ubuntu but different package manager and slightly different semantics in a few places. NixOS is radically different and if you can make it work for you, you’ll likely be much happier after the learning curve. If however your needs are just outside the norms enough, NixOS could also just as well be very frustrating. It’s one of those things you’ve gotta try and invest a reasonable amount of time in, which might not pay off, but if it does, could pay off big (or so the marketing pitch goes).

[mehrdadn]

Thanks!