I’ve been here a week ago already asking if Arch would be fine for a laptop used for university, as stability is a notable factor in that and I’m already using EndeavourOS at home, but now I’m curious about something else too - what about Arch vs NixOS?

I heard that NixOS is pretty solid, as due to the one file for your entire system format you can both copy and restore your system easily whenever, apart from your normal files and application configurations of course.

Are there any major downsides to NixOS compared to Arch apart from the Arch Wiki being a bit less relevant? I’d also lose access to the AUR, but admittedly I don’t think I’ve ever actually needed it for anything, it’s just nice to have. Also, since NixOS has both rolling release and static release and you can mix and match if you wanna get packages from unstable or not, I’m not losing Arch’s bleeding edge, which is nice.

  • @warmaster
    1•1 year ago

    Arch based distros are easy AF. I’ve been on Linux for 2 years, I’ve tried 10+ distros, and Arch has been the easiest for me, and stable as it gets, while allowing me to get the latest drivers needed for gaming.

    I’ve been using Crystal Linux, but got tired of it’s CLI only package helper, and since then I’ve moved to Manjaro KDE.

    Whatever you chose, make sure you get automatic BTRFS snapshots, so you can roll back at boot whenever you wreck it.

    I’ve read here on Lemmy that NixOS is a great concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, stating that it’s overly complicated and documentation is lacking.

    If you only care about stability then you should go with Debian. If instead you want something that limits you so that you can’t easily wreck it, you could use an immutable distro like Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue, BlendOS or Ubuntu Core Desktop.