Comment by tombert
4 days ago
The reason I keep it around on my laptop is mostly because of the snapshotting.
I generally do know my way around Linux command line nowadays, but with Ubuntu and Arch (especially early in my career when I didn't know what I was doing), I would get into states that break the video driver, or break GRUB, or make the machine unstable, and the only thing I could do was reinstall the whole OS.
With NixOS, since it's all declarative, if I end up really breaking something, I can always reboot and choose a previous generation. It makes things a lot less scary for me, I can experiment with and play with different boot parameters and drivers and I know that I won't be stuck spending two hours reinstalling everything. It changes the entire way that I work.
For example, on my current laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad, AMD), I was having an issue with my USB ports idling out, so sometimes the first ~4 seconds of my typing wasn't registering since the USB port had to wake up. The solution involved adding a kernel parameter `usbcore.autosuspend=-1`.
Had this been something like Ubuntu, I have been burned enough trying to add kernel params that I might honestly have just lived with the annoyance because I didn't want to risk everything breaking, but because I knew that there was no actual risk with NixOS, I was able to fix it permanently, and I have the solution committed to Git if I ever have to do this on another computer.
Just a side note for those who aren't on NixOS, but who would like 90% of snapshotting: use timeshift. Especially if your file system is BTRFS. It'll do daily snapshots of all your system files, going back 5 days by default. I've only had to use it once, but it was invaluable. Another nice thing is it's very much a set-and-forget program.
Yeah, timeshift is pretty cool too. I think I prefer NixOS's style as it's directly integrated into the rebuild system, and the dedicated Nix store allows me to do the snapshots while also being persistent, but if you don't want to drink the NixOS Kool-aid, timeshift is definitely a valuable tool.