Last time I didn’t upgrade for a long while some drivers broke, maybe I’ll just switch to NixOS this time since it seems interesting. Does anyone here use NixOS? What do you think about it?
Most likely, nothing will happen. Arch breaking if you don’t updating 5x a day is more of a meme than a reality.
I’ve updated a client’s Arch server that hadn’t been touched for years, and it went just fine.
You’re the user, you’re in control, you’re empowered to make sure it won’t break after the update, you’re empowered to fix it if it does.
I am using NixOS and have used Arch before. Its great. No dependency hell, superb config management (with home manager) and builtin rollbacks. But the nix language is somewhat arcane. Error messages are only somewhat helpful and docs are really lacking. NixOS also uses quite the amount of disk space in its store. Would only recommend NixOS if youre a resourceful programmer (or not)
PS. Ive never had arch break any drivers on me, or any upgrade failing (unless a package itself is borked, but they usually put out posts for this). But my systems all amd, ymmv
Oh yeah I use nvidia so it’s pretty unsurprising. How much coding is required? I know how to code so it’s not a very big deal but I’d like to have an idea.
I wouldn’t call it coding. It’s more about writing configurations. You have to provide a list of packages you need and some configuration for them like configuring default desktop environment. I recommend searching for dotfiles repos with configuration.nix on github to get an idea.
As someone elase said, it’s not really coding but more like writing a configuration. If you need an example (I’m using AMD so there will be some changes required) you can check out my own config at https://gitlab.com/theshatterstone/nix-conf
Edit: Also, the note on shebangs applies to all scripts within NixOS.
I use Debian so that i can ignore it for a year and it still wont break.
I have several virtual machines here with Arch that I often don’t use for months. And when I do use them, I proceed as I do with every update. So before an update, I check if something has been published at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects the installation in question. This is done automatically with the help of the tool informant. If something has been published that affects my installations, I take that into account. Otherwise I run pacman -Syu as usual. And that’s it.
After a long time I usually upgrade the keyring first with
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring For upgrading I like to use Topgrade which also upgrades other stuff (snaps, flatpacks, pip, …)
