Linux

I've been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.

The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of "channels", which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.

Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between. guix package --switch-genereation=28 and boom you're at that generation (it's like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.

Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn't available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.

The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn't use systemd. Not sure if it's a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn't a real replacement.

Use Gentoo, as it is way more stable and can do anything that Arch can.

I recently switched to Void after making runs with Arch and Fedora.

I'm not anti-systemd. I just like Void. Rolling release model. Light weight. Minimalistic. I've read how the package manager is small but for me everything I need is there. That's the first time that's happened for me as with other distros I would have had to install via flatpak, snap by source, appimage and by the package manager.

Not sure if that would work for your use case or not.

How about NixOS unstable?

Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don't really know.

Maybe i just update and see what happens.

NixOS might not be for you, it is horrible if you don't want to adapt to it. But if this happened on NixOS, you would just reboot into the state of your computer before you ran the update. Or if it's just a program like VLC you could just close VLC switch to the previous generation and open VLC again

Maybe it's me, but while you have outlined the events that got you to this point, I don't understand either the 'attitude' you find problematic or what it is about Arch you would hope to find elsewhere. Hard to make a recommendation without those.