[rgrmrts]

I tend to mostly agree with this, having spent years with Arch and Gentoo on my personal machines. I like Debian and usually default to it for containers, servers, and VMs.

My desktop and laptop run NixOS though, primarily because it gives me access to one of the largest package repositories with up to date packages AND makes it effortless to rollback if/when I break things. This was my primary issue with Arch, where I’d have to be cautious about what I was upgrading and when. With NixOS I’m generally pretty reckless because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state.

[btreecat]

>because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state.

After a decade with arch as my primary OS, I can say the same.

I know plenty of folks have claimed issues with upgrades, maybe I'm lucky with the variety of hardware I've used.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

What command would that be? The only way I would know to fix a broken Arch box is to manually fix whatever went wrong, not reboot -> select the previous generation in the bootloader -> done.

[btreecat]

Generally, if it's just a package rollback, it's `pacman -U <path-to-cached-package>`

[__MatrixMan__]

Same story here. A long path with Debian as the penultimate step, still used for things I have to collaborate with others on, NixOS for myself.

I dream of the day I start using nix to build my work stuff, but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

[yoyohello13]

I run Debian on my base machine and use Nix for all my user space tools. I think it’s the best of both worlds. I get nix for all my config management, but a normal stable distro underneath as a fallback.

[rgrmrts]

Yep, also an underrated path! I had RHEL with nix briefly, so you got the support and stability of RHEL with the latest tools and packages from nixpkgs if you needed them.