[diggan]

Keep trying out new things, new things don't work as I want so I wanna go back to how things were and have to manually "rollback" stuff (see deleting files, changing configs). Also managed to screw up the bootloader and partitions on more than one time. I'm not gonna pretend I'm an expert, I just want a simple system, which Arch really is. But sometimes too simple, requires a lot of reading and understanding, which is usually not a problem, but sometimes it is.

One recent example was me trying out KDE Plasma. Usually I use AwesomeVM but the HN thread about the new Plasma version made me try it out in Arch. After the install and trying to use it for a while, I wanted to go back.

Uninstalling the package(s) is not enough, as it already has been overwriting bunch of stuff and changed configs that are not being rolled back after uninstalling.

Still to this day KRunner launches (via some d-bus command or something like that) when I do my Super+R shortcut, which usually runs the AwesomeVM launcher, not KRunner. Haven't figured out how to get rid of it yet, but got other stuff to do right now, so simply living with it for now.

With NixOS, I'd just reboot and select the previous version where KDE Plasma was never installed.

[mehrdadn]

I feel like the problems you're citing (inability to simply roll back, etc.) aren't really Arch problems specifically—you'd have them in any traditional distro (like Debian) too, right?

[diggan]

Oh yes, absolutely, I'd surely screw up equally often if I was using Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distribution, if not more. I was just comparing Arch to NixOS as Arch is my daily driver, while I'm evaluating the switch to NixOS.

[siraben]

I even "DE hopped" using NixOS, trying out 3+ different DEs for fun, and once I was done I just had to revert to an older generation, no nasty leftovers.

[microtonal]

I use NixOS unstable on my desktop/work machine, but when I just started using NixOS, I even regularly hopped between the latest stable release and unstable.

Another fun related feature: NixOS really only requires /nix and /boot to boot. So, some of us just nuke everything except /nix, /boot, and /home on boot:

https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings