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Yes, it's the most stable yet infuriating experience I've ever had with Linux. I'm currently using it, but I don't know for how much longer...
I've been tempted by Guix
How unstable is the unstable branch exactly?
Definitely more stable than Arch. Plus, you can easily roll back if something breaks, and you can choose which packages should use the unstable branch while keeping the overall system stable, which I find amazing. I don't think I've ever had a breaking update, which I can't say about Arch.
The problem I have with Nix is that you can effectively forget about running random programs or GitHub projects. You either package everything the Nix way or nothing works. As a developer and someone who often likes to try stuff out, that's really annoying. And Nix, the language, is ass, so is the whole build system. Nobody can convince me otherwise.
I agree with this, not being able to install things globally or use other package managers like pip was really annoying. I didn’t spend that much time with it to be honest, but just simply trying to set up a dev environment wasn’t fun. Also I’m pretty sure elixir doesn’t work on nix at least when I tried it
You can also rollback changes on arch using snapper.
It's not really the same thing though, those are filesystem snapshots, not package registry snapshots. Think of Nix generations as blueprints of how to construct your OS and environment, not the files themselves (though those are certainly required). I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but it's a lot more powerful than what basically amounts to a backup.
You should say "unstable channel". It's literally just a rolling release that pulls from the
nixpkgsmaster branch. So it's only as stable as it needs to be to pass the Hydra CI tests.And if you get to a working version, you can pin that as a Nix flake to avoid anything breaking until the next time you
nix flake update.Not anymore then arch imo unstable is just rolling release compared to the specific versions which are more like fedora or similar