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.
After having used Parabola GNU/Linux-libre for more than ten years, I seriously considered moving to GNU Guix System. The only thing holding me back is that I saw some seriously out of date packages in the repository. Off the top of my head, GNOME was like three major versions behind. How do you deal with that?
There’s a lack of contributors. Honestly, if not for the stupid recession and joblessness, I would have loved to dive into Guix packaging.
Its pretty easy to update the packages yourself, just bump the version and the hash, or if needed add some missing libraries.
Because the review process is slow, sometimes it’s easier to just check the Guix Patches buglist for existing submitted patchfiles and then add them to your tree