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.
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?