That's right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)
It's definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)
I definitely want to try out gentoo sometime. My system is not very powerful. I'm afraid it'll compile for many days ๐
I was just going off based on its history. It began based on gentoo. (Wikipedia) but yea it is independent now.
Yeah. Most small changes will not rebuild everything. It's just the core dependency updates that are most expensive. Like say openssl got a minor update. Now every package that depends on it needs to be rebuilt and rehashed because of the way nix store works.
Other than the obvious things like arch having better docs and lots of packages, void reminds me of arch before systemd. Especially editing rc.conf etc.
Was it recent? I remember doing the same some years ago ๐
I just wanted something lightweight and fast. It was between alpine (gentoo based), void and artix (arch based). I decided to go for void because it's new and an independent distro. I'll try the other two some day.
You can achieve similar results with ansible. But I like nix better. It is reproducible. You can think of it like docker.
Nix is also declarative and has rollback. Also, nixos-rebuild is idempotent.
Yeah. For reproducibility I still use nix. Especially when I have to share my dev environment with a team or to spin up identical servers.
Yeah there's a lot of state accumulation especially in home folder which I clear manually from time to time.
In Nixos you can configure the impermanence module to clear unwanted state on your system and make it a "fresh install" on every reboot.
๐ Same! I've been looking at Ashos (meta distribution) or just using btrfs snapshots to rollback when I break something.