this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

I have to disagree with this, with home-manager you can pretty much put just put your normal config files inside your NixOS config and map them into wherever they're meant to go, except now they're managed by nix

The built in config options are really nice but you don't have to use them in the slightest as long as the package itsself is in nixpkgs