For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
Honestly every time I mention NixOS I get someone telling me it’s not a beginner friendly distro
Provided you get to understand the config file which only took a day of fiddling it’s so much easier to use than mutable distros
I add something to my package list and it just works, and nothing else breaks and even if I do manage to screw up my entire system so badly that I can’t boot it anymore I just boot the last working configuration and undo my changes
I believe people have even built UIs around the config to make it more user friendly
https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui https://github.com/vlinkz/nix-software-center
I agree, when I was on other distributions I would gradually customize things until something broken; then it was easier to start from scratch than to fix my mistakes. With NixOS it still gives me the ability to tinker with things, but makes it much easier than starting from scratch when I inevitably mess it up.
I find it’s better than that, don’t even need to start from scratch because it’s so difficult to break it to the point you can’t just revert to a previous version