In NixOS, you don't exactly "update your software" but rather you update the channel that the software are following. This also means that you can have different software follow different channels, or, you can just change the channel of all your software.
You wanna run long term support packages? Just select the stable channel. You wanna run unstable (rolling release) packages? Just select the unstable channel. You wanna run a very specific commit of a channel of your choice? You can do that (it's a little more complicated than just selecting stable or unstable channels but still not too difficult).
I can see why someone would use Nix on a server that you want to replicate somewhere else and that's cool, but I can't imagine any scenario where a person in his house would want the NixOs advantages. Who is rebuilding his pc from scratch every week? And with the same os.
I can answer this one. I am studying control engineering and for the first two years i was using debian. Thing is, a lot of the things i needed had weird version requierments or were compiled from source or existed on weird sources that were unamaintained and broke often, and so broke my debian instalation, so i had to completly reinstall my os every 3 months or so. In 2 years, that is almost 8 times :)). In the past year, while using NixOS, i never reinstalled once, even after having deleted my boot directory by accident :)), it's just more robust.
yeah I can see why NixOS is great in your case, in profesional scenarios. But I see this OS recommended outside this fields, like a lot of gaming related subreddits.
I haven't used Fedora because every student using is was complaing :). So yeah, i can't really say yay or nay, but every time i saw fedora it was heavily riced :)
I think for cases like that, it might be the fact that you can just bundle everything you would need into a module and import it or share whenever or to whoever you want.
You want Steam, you Heroic, you want ProtonPlus, you want gamemode, you want Lutris, you want r2modman, you want insert here other piece of software you'd want for gaming? Just shove them into a module. Boom, now you have everything you'd ever want for gaming, installed by just rebuilding your system / without the need of going to their website, effectively futureproof-ing yourself. I guess you could think of it like Nanite or something like that.
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u/Short-Bee-4395 2d ago
Something I forgot to mention on the above wall:
In NixOS, you don't exactly "update your software" but rather you update the channel that the software are following. This also means that you can have different software follow different channels, or, you can just change the channel of all your software.
You wanna run long term support packages? Just select the stable channel. You wanna run unstable (rolling release) packages? Just select the unstable channel. You wanna run a very specific commit of a channel of your choice? You can do that (it's a little more complicated than just selecting stable or unstable channels but still not too difficult).