This is more of a personal dilemma, since I keep finding myself switching back and forth between NixOS and Gentoo every now and then. I’ve done this twice for each so far ever since I immediately started off my Linux journey with Gentoo, making a quick stop at Arch once when I didn’t have enough time to set either of them up properly. Both of them provides a massive amount of control over my system and lets me build my system in weird and interesting ways, e.g. musl, clang, and/or SELinux for Gentoo and impermanence for NixOS (it still kind of blows my mind right now). Personally, I find Gentoo more intuitive, but NixOS is more powerful for managing complex systems, but then again, I don’t have any complex systems to manage, only a singular desktop system. I’d love to keep switching back and forth, but I feel like it has become sort of a time sink for me, somewhat hindering my studies, and thus I feel the need to decide which one to settle on, and which one to keep in a VM to mess around with. That brings me to the title of the post, which do you think is better for a simple desktop system? Also, I don’t know how viable dual booting is, given that I manage my dotfiles almost entirely with home-manager, and I like to have secure boot.
I think NixOS is unlike any other distro out there. Other distros are some combination of prepackaged software and a package manager. That’s cool and all. But NixOS allows you to describe the state of systems and create them in the same way over and over again. That’s significantly more powerful and quite a differentiator.
This is precisely why, if this was something more complex like a server or a setup with multiple devices, NixOS blows Gentoo out of the water. But, how significant is that advantage for a simple desktop? That’s not a rhetorical question, I genuinely do not know. There are two other factors for me that play into this decision that I forgot to mention: documentation, and unique features. Gentoo has better documentation, and even if that was not the case, I could just use the Arch Wiki; I can’t do the same with NixOS. As for unique features, these are currently what brings the two to a stalemate for me: NixOS has rollbacks and impermanence, and Gentoo has SELinux (and musl, which I want to try out). I suppose I can replicate rollbacks on Gentoo with something like Git and ZFS snapshots, not perfectly but to an extent satisfactory for my rather simple use case, and musl is more of a personal curiosity than anything significant for me. So it boils down to which between SELinux and impermanence would I rather have on my main system?