I’ve been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn’t see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.
So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I’m still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.
It’s clear that I’m missing something so please help me understand what it is.
They do very different things even if the outcome is the same. You are not rollingback your system by downgrading each package. You are statefully changing your filesystem. Rollbacks in Nix and Guix are internet free, atomic and reproducible because they amount to changing the target of a single symlink