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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Interesting post! I’ve been thinking about trying Linux with a rolling distrib. They mention NixOS, do people here have an opinion on that one?

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I am not sure I would call NixOs a rolling release distribution. It has releases every 6 month like Ubuntu, but it does not have LTS releases. And due to the relatively small community only the latest release is supported. I am doing software development on a desktop workstation, that followed all releases since the start of 2018. And overall it has been rock solid. If an update, either a new release or a config change of mine, breaks something important, I reboot with the previous setup, and I can continue to work until I have time to investigate what is going on. I've used that perhaps 5 times since 2018. But when I used it, it was absolutely critical.

But expect a steep learning curve.

nixos-unstable is a rolling release. I use it daily and on all of my servers.

I love NixOS. I would 100% recommend it for servers and probably 70% recommend it for desktop usage.

Feel free to ask me anything but instead of repeating past points I'll just link some past writings:

- https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/

- https://kevincox.ca/2020/09/06/switching-to-desktop-nixos/

- https://kevincox.ca/2021/05/06/workstation-install-with-nixo...

NixOS is programmed in a functional programming language and aims to be fully pure and reproducible. Using it since over a year now and my entire hackspace runs on it. Can highly recommend it.

Why not Debian testing branch, as per TFA?

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