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Comment by DenseComet | Hacker News Reader

For a daily driver, I'd just use nixos-unstable instead of a specific release to get access to all the up to date packages. It's actually not as unstable as the name might imply. PRs are merged into the master branch of nixpkgs and are only merged into the unstable branch once the updated package is successfully built so it tends to be perfectly OK for daily use.

A lot of updates do get backported to stable branches and you can do it yourself pretty easily if you need an update, so running stable for servers makes sense. But for a desktop I prefer the rolling release, always updated model.

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I do not like backported packages. So is unstable directly upstream stable version of packages exactly like Arch? Cos that is what I want.

Cos in Linux distro context, debian or nixos unstable repo just means it is not yet tested for the specific distro. But in fact the packages itself would be latest stable versions from upstreams.

Unstable (most often than not) is almost an exact copy of the latest branch, which means it has most of it's packages updated to latest version. Given the nature and abstractions of NixOS, unstable ends up being way more stable than most distros, you also get rollbacks for free.

But unstable repo is always a second tier citizen in most distros. This means less eyes on them. This is where Arch excels. Arch just provides packages "as is" or how it was intended by the upstream and the packages are first class citizens. So they get as much as attention as it is gonna get.

The usage of "unstable" itself is from an era where even stable versions broke a lot. This is not the case anymore. And stable repos breaking more than unstable repos in some distros atleast proves it.

Unstable in NixOS is nothing like the horrors that wait in Fedora Rawhide and Debian Sid.

NixOS benefits from the fact that it has unit tests and that all packages are built in a consistent way across all packages.

Archlinux is a bit more stable then NixOS unstable, but not significantly so. But more importantly if you do somehow manage to update to a broken build, it's take less than a second to roll back to exactly where you were before hand.

Among contributors (and maybe even among the whole community), unstable is probably more popular on NixOS than the stable releases, so if anything it has more eyeballs.

The distinction also matters less on NixOS anyway, since you can (generally) freely mix and match packages from different releases.

Lots of Nix packages are totally unmodified, but many also have to be patched in able to cope with the read-only package store.

On the other hand, NixOS is, like Arch, a distro without any defaults aside from systemd. So Nixpkgs doesn't include patches that try to reshape upstream packages for the sake of some particular vision of the ideal desktop experience or whatever.

Nix's official package repository, Nixpkgs, is the most up-to-date repository out there[1]. Especially so for the unstable channel. So I assume it would fit your needs well.

But with Nix, you can be more flexible and mix packages from stable and unstable channels very easily. In my case, the kernel and desktop environment comes from the stable channel while the rest comes from unstable.

[1]: https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

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