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Comment by bsnnkv | Hacker News Reader

Last week I switched from my Arch VM to a NixOS 22.05 VM full-time and it has been an excellent experience so far.

Looking forward to seeing and reporting back on what my first NixOS upgrade experience is like.

Having absolutely no fear going into an OS upgrade is one of the best parts of nix. If anything breaks, you can go back to your old config and be sure it’ll still work.

Going back to an OS that doesn’t have this property feels like programming without version control.

Definitely up there for the top Nix benefits - truly atomic OS upgrades.

It's a shame this isn't explicitly highlighted on nixos.org, it's only implied in the "Is the previous version better? Roll back anytime."[0] section, when it's true for both packages and your entire system's config.

[0] https://nixos.org/explore.html

Touching on that version control and Nix are the same thing. Would be cool if they merged in some system.

You may be interested in Flakes[0], which locks your nixpkgs (and other "inputs") to a specific known version.

Obligatory disclaimer, they're still in beta, but everyone's using them anyway. There's some ongoing work[1] before they're officially released.

[0] https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Flakes [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE-vLFMTXxM

Update: I'm on the nixos-unstable "rolling distro" so I don't actually need to do anything.

Also if anyone is wondering, nixos-unstable feels very stable as an end-user.

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