I have an old box running Gnome on Ubuntu. I did a massive update hoping they finally fixed some of my gripes with it.

still no right click -> create text file in the file browser

Welp, I’ll update again in two years

I’ve been to a restaurant in Korea where you pay per person and they just serve you one main dish (you have no choice) and like 8 unlimited side dishes

It was about $5 and you had a choice of topping up or not. It was great, actually

UwUntu

Yeah, the problem with NixOS is when you mess something up you can always restore to an older working version

KnixOS, the K is silent

When Ubuntu didn’t cleanly upgrade I had to wipe it even though it was an upgrade from LTS to LTS. No such issues with NixOS

Roll back to a previous version, source control your configuration to record all your changes, install services for your packages to configure them, switch to a new version without rebooting

They are not as secure as grapheneos, and they don’t really care

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

For the point I’m making, I don’t have vim and never used it because I’ve never installed it

It only ships with vi

If it’s standard why does my distro not ship it

You can roll back if you have the older version on disk if you didn’t install newer dependencies that make them incompatible with your system

I have this issue with sysd manager, the characters are all boxes in the latest flatpak

Nix installs the deps separately if they are different versions and lets you install any version, even some ancient one

Never used it, but I’m fairly sure you can’t have conflicting dependencies with pacman. If package A requires a new dependency version and package B requires an older one you can’t have both installed

Uninstall uninstalls the package. I want to use an older working version

Sometimes I just want to roll back one piece of software. Try doing that with flatpak

You need them like you need fire extinguishers

My Ubuntu LTS upgrade failed. Would have killed for a rollback

Nix, yes, because it has rollbacks

Here’s how you install Gnome in nixos

services.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true;

Here’s how you also install gdm

services.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;

It’s about remembering that you did. I have no idea what changes I’ve made to my ancient Ubuntu box so if an upgrade borks my system again I’m SOL

Also, a Nix upgrade won’t break your system, unlike Ubuntu