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I tend to mostly agree with this, having spent years with Arch and Gentoo on my personal machines. I like Debian and usually default to it for containers, serve

I tend to mostly agree with this, having spent years with Arch and Gentoo on my personal machines. I like Debian and usually default to it for containers, servers, and VMs. My desktop and laptop run NixOS though, primarily because it gives me access to one of the largest package repositories with up to date packages AND makes it effortless to rollback if/when I break things. This was my primary issue with Arch, where I’d have to be cautious about what I was upgrading and when. With NixOS I’m generally pretty reckless because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Same story here. A long path with Debian as the penultimate step, still used for things I have to collaborate with others on, NixOS for myself. I dream of the day I start using nix to build my work stuff, but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.
yoyohello13 2y ago
I run Debian on my base machine and use Nix for all my user space tools. I think it’s the best of both worlds. I get nix for all my config management, but a normal stable distro underneath as a fallback.
- rgrmrts 2y ago
  Yep, also an underrated path! I had RHEL with nix briefly, so you got the support and stability of RHEL with the latest tools and packages from nixpkgs if you needed them.
btreecat 2y ago
>because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state. After a decade with arch as my primary OS, I can say the same. I know plenty of folks have claimed issues with upgrades, maybe I'm lucky with the variety of hardware I've used.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  What command would that be? The only way I would know to fix a broken Arch box is to manually fix whatever went wrong, not reboot -> select the previous generation in the bootloader -> done.
  - btreecat 2y ago
    Generally, if it's just a package rollback, it's `pacman -U <path-to-cached-package>`

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Same story here. A long path with Debian as the penultimate step, still used for things I have to collaborate with others on, NixOS for myself. I dream of the day I start using nix to build my work stuff, but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

yoyohello13 2y ago

I run Debian on my base machine and use Nix for all my user space tools. I think it’s the best of both worlds. I get nix for all my config management, but a normal stable distro underneath as a fallback.

rgrmrts 2y ago
Yep, also an underrated path! I had RHEL with nix briefly, so you got the support and stability of RHEL with the latest tools and packages from nixpkgs if you needed them.

btreecat 2y ago

>because I really can’t break things in a way that would require more than a command and a reboot at most to get back to a working state. After a decade with arch as my primary OS, I can say the same. I know plenty of folks have claimed issues with upgrades, maybe I'm lucky with the variety of hardware I've used.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
What command would that be? The only way I would know to fix a broken Arch box is to manually fix whatever went wrong, not reboot -> select the previous generation in the bootloader -> done.
- btreecat 2y ago
  Generally, if it's just a package rollback, it's `pacman -U <path-to-cached-package>`