[Chris_Newton]

Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO.

Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while installing routine updates with `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`. In fairness, at least with NixOS you can normally roll back to a previous working configuration where you can try to fix or work around the problem if that does happen. It’s still painful if you have to do that, though.

Even if your routine updates all go smoothly, as you mentioned, each stable release is only supported for a very limited time window after the next one is out. NixOS doesn’t have any long-term support branch in the sense that some distros do. Again, you can overcome this to a degree by customising your configuration if you need specific versions of certain packages, but in doing so you’re moving back towards manually setting things up and resolving your own compatibility issues rather than having a distro with compatible packages you can install in whatever combination you want, which reduces the value of using a distro with a package repository in the first place.

To be clear, I’m a big fan of NixOS. I run it as my daily driver on a workstation where I do a lot of work on different projects for different clients. Its ability to have a clean, declarative description of what’s currently installed globally or for any given user or even when working in any given project directory for any given user is extremely valuable to me.

But it’s also fair to say that NixOS is not for everyone. It has been by far the least stable Linux distro I have ever used, in the sense of “If I turn my computer on and install the latest updates from the stable branch, will my computer still work afterwards?”. If you’re looking for a distro you can deploy and then maintain with little more than semi-automatic routine updates for a period of years then, at least for now, it is not the distro for you.

[urlwolf]

Very interesting to read this. I've never had breakage, but now I'm questioning whether this is the exception, not the rule.

On ubuntu, every new version broke something, sometimes updates make the computer boot to a blank screen... it was a terrible experince for early-days linux users. This was many years ago, but it made me distrust most distros I tried. Except for nixos.

[Chris_Newton]

I can only speak anecdotally, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been unlucky with this particular box, but I’ve seen a few quite serious issues going back over the past few years since I switched to NixOS as my primary OS.

Not so long ago there was some sort of problem with Hydra builds for a recent version of Node. That seemed to result in trying to build the whole thing locally on every update, taking a huge amount of time and then typically failing there as well.

I’ve seen things with Nvidia drivers vs Linux kernel versions as well. We did have a specific reason for choosing Nvidia for that particular workstation, but otherwise, I’d agree with popular advice to get AMD if you’re building a Linux box, just based on the frequency and severity of Nvidia driver issues we’ve seen here.

I’ve seen a few issues with Ubuntu upgrades over the years as well, and wouldn’t necessarily rate that much higher for stability. That’s always surprised me because IME Debian Stable is the gold standard — something I’ve trusted with our production servers for well over a decade now, from unattended upgrades to several major new releases, and barely seen a flicker of a hint of anything breaking in all that time. To be fair, I haven’t used Debian much on workstations, so I don’t know whether the kinds of issues I’ve experienced with NixOS and Ubuntu would have been more common if I had.