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Comment by tracnar | Hacker News Reader

You can use the unstable branch for rolling releases closer to how arch works.

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.

I did read my reading but it is really blurry and hard to find information on how often the packages gets updated.

I also would like plain upstream versions of software without a distro doing any changes. And with NixOS and Nix, this is perfectly capable of fixing even the remote issues of instability that usually happens with Arch Linux.

Pretty much yes, I also switched from Arch and this works great for me.

I only had issues a couple times with broken packages, then you can either not update at all or remove those packages. It should also be possible to keep the older version of those packages in the nix config but I did not look into it.

Yeah, there are a few ways to do this. See the section on 'Pinning an unstable service' for an example of how to pull in just one package or service from another release:

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/FAQ/Pinning_Nixpkgs

Thank you for confirming tracnar. I really appreciate it.

But if possible can you also elaborate on "pretty much" yes part? What is the catch or what am I missing?

With flakes I am using the master branch. You cannot get more bleeding edge and there is absolutely no danger. If something does break, I just boot the previous system. So awesome!

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