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.
Depends on what you’re doing at University. I was using Arch but an update caused CUDA to stop working so I couldn’t work on an assignment. Why did it stop working? They updated CUDA to 12.3 days before updating the NVIDIA driver to a version which supported CUDA. The maintainers are mostly negligent and the community is rather toxic so I’d avoid Arch for that kind of thing. NixOS looks interesting and has lots of benefits however, for a dedicated University computer I would recommend using the most boring Linux distro available like Fedora or Ubuntu.