I hopped from arch (2010-2019) to Nixos (2019-2023). I had my issues with it but being a functional programmer, I really liked the declarative style of configuring your OS. That was until last week. I decided to try out void Linux (musl). I'm happy with it so far.
Why did I switch?
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Nix is extremely slow and data intensive (compared to xbps). I mean sometimes 100-1000x or more. I know it is not a fair comparison because nix is doing much more. Even for small tweaks or dependency / toolchain update it'll download/rebuild all packages. This would mean 3-10GB (or more) download on Nixos for something that is a few KB or MB on xbps.
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Everything is noticeably slower. My system used way more CPU and Ram even during idle. CPU was at 1-3% during idle and my battery life was 2 to 3.5h. Xfce idle ram usage was 1.5 GB on Nixos. On Void it's around 0.5GB. I easily get 5-7h of battery life for my normal usage. It is 10h-12h if I am reading an ebook.
Nix disables a lot of compiler optimisations apparently for reproducibility. Maybe this is the reason?
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Just a lot of random bugs. Firefox would sometimes leak memory and hang. I have only 8 GB of ram. WiFi reconnecting all the time randomly. No such issues so far with void.
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Of course the abstractions and the language have a learning curve. It's harder for a beginner to package or do something which is not already exposed as an option. (This wasn't a big issue for me most of the time.)
For now, I'll enjoy the speed and simplicity of void. It has less packages compared to nix but I have flatpak if needed. So far, I had to install only Android studio with it.
My verdict is to use Nixos for servers and shared dev environments. For desktop it's probably not suitable for most.
My problem with snapshots is that sometimes I break something and notice it way later. This accumulated state at one point breaks something (i.e. I break something). With NixOS I'm forced to do things right, which is also annoying and time consuming.
That's right. I just rely on intuition to create a snapshot just before I think some operation will potentially break the system. (Along with daily snapshots)
It's definitely not as bulletproof and transparent as Nixos. You can see what has changed by doing a diff :)