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Would you mind sharing your reasons for switching? I'm currently using Arch as well and only stumbled upon NixOS thanks to this post.

by osense 12y ago

Havvy 12y ago
If you don't pay extra care to updating Arch, it's possible that an update will brick your OS install requiring a fresh install. Granted, they usually tell you on their websites when this happens along with how to not brick your OS, but you have to be diligent to check every time.
- osense 12y ago
  From my experience, at most that can go wrong is the update fails or similar non-fatal issue may arise. I haven't been using Arch for very long (not more than a year), but I never had any issues that would break the system. As you already mentioned, they post the the necessary info on the website and even now after the pacman database format upgrade when pacman fails it specifically tells you to run a command to fix this. Oh and don't forget the massive wiki, that one's a killer. Plus I really like this whole rolling release philosophy with up-to-date packages :)
  - Havvy 12y ago
    You can have up to date packages with NixOS too. Just have to change the default channel.
- kaens 12y ago
  I've never had an arch update brick my system. It's really pretty hard to brick a 'nix. When I ran arch (and I ran it for quite a while) I had the occasional breakage, but I don't recall ever having a break that I needed to boot into a live environment to fix, let alone require a re-install. Granted, it might be quicker to re-install if you haven't fermented in linux-land for long enough to know how to figure out what's borked and what you need to do to fix it, particularly if you would need to boot a live usb or something, but I'm struggling to think of things that would actually brick a linux system these days that aren't either hardware failures, some really crazy filesystem corruption, literally rm -rf / for way too long, or being installed on a machine with no alt-boot method. On the bright side, reinstalling isn't too bad unless you don't use separate partitions. All that said, there is a pretty hefty active maintenance cost to running Arch. At least they're explicit about it.
- sirodoht 12y ago
  You should check pacmatic[1], which checks the official website for you and informs you about breaking updates. Along with this, it informs you of any config files (*.pacnew) you have to manually update. Which brings me to my second problem with Arch: every other update I have to manually inspect the changes on various config files and merge with my personal changes. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stability#Consider_using_pacmatic https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stabilit...
- jeffdn 12y ago
  The only update from Arch that has bricked my system was when they reconfigured the whole file system, to unify things (as opposed to it being split up between {/usr{/local,},}/bin) -- that was a nasty shock. In all my years of using Arch (I switched from Gentoo in 2010), I've really had very few problems. It's a very friendly yet powerful and customizable distribution, in my estimation.
davexunit 12y ago
Pacman doesn't do transactional upgrades and rollbacks. Nix does.
coding4all 12y ago
1) My system breaks once every year. Literally just once. 2) NixOS package management is similar to the Arch system because binary installs come first, and AUR installs (source builds) come second. 3) NixOS has an easier/simpler rollback and configuration system than Arch. 4) Manjaro, a more stable Arch distro, doesn't fit me without having to build a custom Linux image. It's been a while, so this might have changed since I've last checked it out. 5) FreeBSD is enticing, but if I have to go BSD, it's OpenBSD or DragonFly. I've been thinking *BSD ever since the switch to systemd...

Would you mind sharing your reasons for switching? I'm currently using Arch as well and only stumbled upon NixOS thanks to this post.

by osense 12y ago

Would you mind sharing your reasons for switching? I'm currently using Arch as well and only stumbled upon NixOS thanks to this post.

Havvy 12y ago

If you don't pay extra care to updating Arch, it's possible that an update will brick your OS install requiring a fresh install. Granted, they usually tell you on their websites when this happens along with how to not brick your OS, but you have to be diligent to check every time.

osense 12y ago
From my experience, at most that can go wrong is the update fails or similar non-fatal issue may arise. I haven't been using Arch for very long (not more than a year), but I never had any issues that would break the system. As you already mentioned, they post the the necessary info on the website and even now after the pacman database format upgrade when pacman fails it specifically tells you to run a command to fix this. Oh and don't forget the massive wiki, that one's a killer. Plus I really like this whole rolling release philosophy with up-to-date packages :)
- Havvy 12y ago
  You can have up to date packages with NixOS too. Just have to change the default channel.
kaens 12y ago
I've never had an arch update brick my system. It's really pretty hard to brick a 'nix. When I ran arch (and I ran it for quite a while) I had the occasional breakage, but I don't recall ever having a break that I needed to boot into a live environment to fix, let alone require a re-install. Granted, it might be quicker to re-install if you haven't fermented in linux-land for long enough to know how to figure out what's borked and what you need to do to fix it, particularly if you would need to boot a live usb or something, but I'm struggling to think of things that would actually brick a linux system these days that aren't either hardware failures, some really crazy filesystem corruption, literally rm -rf / for way too long, or being installed on a machine with no alt-boot method. On the bright side, reinstalling isn't too bad unless you don't use separate partitions. All that said, there is a pretty hefty active maintenance cost to running Arch. At least they're explicit about it.
sirodoht 12y ago
You should check pacmatic[1], which checks the official website for you and informs you about breaking updates. Along with this, it informs you of any config files (*.pacnew) you have to manually update. Which brings me to my second problem with Arch: every other update I have to manually inspect the changes on various config files and merge with my personal changes. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stability#Consider_using_pacmatic https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enhance_system_stabilit...
jeffdn 12y ago
The only update from Arch that has bricked my system was when they reconfigured the whole file system, to unify things (as opposed to it being split up between {/usr{/local,},}/bin) -- that was a nasty shock. In all my years of using Arch (I switched from Gentoo in 2010), I've really had very few problems. It's a very friendly yet powerful and customizable distribution, in my estimation.

davexunit 12y ago

Pacman doesn't do transactional upgrades and rollbacks. Nix does.

coding4all 12y ago

1) My system breaks once every year. Literally just once. 2) NixOS package management is similar to the Arch system because binary installs come first, and AUR installs (source builds) come second. 3) NixOS has an easier/simpler rollback and configuration system than Arch. 4) Manjaro, a more stable Arch distro, doesn't fit me without having to build a custom Linux image. It's been a while, so this might have changed since I've last checked it out. 5) FreeBSD is enticing, but if I have to go BSD, it's OpenBSD or DragonFly. I've been thinking *BSD ever since the switch to systemd...