While I think the cynicism is well-earned, we should pay attention to when we’re proven wrong and highlight when companies do something right. Bitwarden’s fuck-up gave them an opportunity to signal that they’re not intending to build a wall for their garden, and they took it.
Nixpkgs has more and newer packages than the aur.
The initial time to get shit done is longer; you can’t simply
make install
, but honestly you shouldn’t have been doing so on arch anyway.Making your own derivation is much easier than making your own PKGBUILD and should be considered in those terms because you’re not just shoving some binary into /usr/bin for it to explode later when glibc updates.
When things fuck up, reverting to your previous config is at worst a reboot away.
I have much less time than I used to, so moving from arch to Nixos has prevented the time otherwise wasted in an arch-chroot trying to fix issues like the kernel upgrading past what the zfs-dkms supports.
If you’re using specialised proprietary tools, working them in with Nix can be an absolute nightmare, but I use a debian container for them.