Personally it's hard for me to go back after I accepted the dogma of NixOS, but maybe if I manage to talk my parents into using Linux I'll install Debian for them.
It has always been easier than windows, which has never stopped the millions of people who used to format their drive and reinstall every few years after suffering from slowdowns.
make a "shutdown" button on the desktop that locks everything and do a full upgrade.
any issue is solved with, try tomorrow after a reboot. you'd be surprised how fast fixes arrive at rolling distros
That works great for a geeky dude like me, but I don't think I'll ever be able to convince my parents on the beauty of NixOS, so having a straightforward mypackage.deb thing that they can download and click on to install stuff probably would be an easier sell.
I ran Arch for about a year, and I liked it, but I had to abuse the `snapper` tool because I was constantly breaking things with the video driver and the like. It worked but I personally think that NixOS's model is just more elegant.
the problem with running debian is that fixes are often not backported, specifically for things end users will care about, like libre office
That's actually easy to answer; video drivers can be really finicky to get working. If you screw it up, it's very easy to get into a state where you have no GUI. Nowadays I am proficient enough to work my way around the command line and I probably could fix a bad driver, but 13 years ago that wasn't really the case, and if I broke the GUI there was a risk where I'd have to nuke the machine and start from scratch. I've also had issues where updating the kernel breaks drivers, and I wasn't able to figure out how to downgrade it.
With NixOS, since adding packages and boot parameters and the like require a rebuilding of the configuration.nix, and each rebuild takes a snapshot, if something is broken all I have to do is reboot and choose a previous generation to get it into a working state, and I can debug the configuration from there.
This actually happened somewhat recently; I had a NixOS server that I was controlling via SSH that I broke the networking support for. It's kind of annoying to control a server if you can't connect to it, but all I had to do is plug in a keyboard and a portable monitor, reboot, and select a previous generation, and fix the broken change, and rebuild. The entire process took like fifteen minutes.
> the problem with running debian is that fixes are often not backported, specifically for things end users will care about, like libre office
Are there not more evergreen releases of Debian?
Sadly, I don't think I'll be able to convince my parents to switch to Linux in the super near future; I need to work on them for awhile and maybe I can convince my dad (though he's pretty entrenched in Windows).
Debian sid or "unstable" is a perfectly fine rolling release distro.
I don't disagree completely with your general sentiment, but the latest version of Libreoffice is available today in Bookworm backports.