>> ArchLinux-style rather thsn NixOS style. Just roll the updates when they are ready into your very own test, int, acc, and finally prod.
The issue is that a rolling-release approach does not have stability guarantees and forces everything to be upgrading all the time.
This does not work very well if you have specialized hardware or scientific equipment. If the drivers for your lab equipment work with a given release of an enterprise linux, you can't just jump on the next release until you have working drivers ready.
The same is true if you are working with some enterprise software which is only certified to work with a given release of an enterprise linux. Would you really want to run business critical software on a version of the operating system which is not (yet) supported by the vendor?
All those hours hunting for the reasons why something suddenly stopped working every two or three weeks need to be paid. So maintenance cost for Linux servers would either skyrocket or no updates would ever be done for years. There are very good reasons why rolling releases in infrastructure are basically a no-go.
Same here, I ran Arch on Hetzner Cloud and find it superior in many subtle ways.
Rolling updates mean that I have to carefully choose what to install in order to keep the maintenance costs down. This has the side effect of reducing the attack surface.
I also manually review updates, which means that I keep up with the news in OS land.
I have to reboot once in a while because of updates, which means that I test resilience of my infrastructure.
By comparison, RedHat stack at work feels creepled and ancient.
You need a RedHat account (read: subscription) for pretty much everything, even the most basic documentation or downloads and yet my bugs in their bugzilla linger for months with none even trying to reproduce, let alone fix.
Every single time I tried using arch, I had nothing but problems with updates. I wasted a lot of time hunting down documentation to things that broke, like mailing, logging, the DE, bluetooth, you name it. Changes that get taken care of by default in other distros. I had some very nasty surprises while using arch. My stable Ubuntu or Debian installs didn't even have a single glitch in the exact same timeframe.
The issue is that a rolling-release approach does not have stability guarantees and forces everything to be upgrading all the time.
This does not work very well if you have specialized hardware or scientific equipment. If the drivers for your lab equipment work with a given release of an enterprise linux, you can't just jump on the next release until you have working drivers ready.
The same is true if you are working with some enterprise software which is only certified to work with a given release of an enterprise linux. Would you really want to run business critical software on a version of the operating system which is not (yet) supported by the vendor?