How "stable" are these kinds of slimming tweaks though? In a rolling release setup, aren't you going to have extraneous packages semi-regularly drag in all of Python or Perl accidentally? The setup might break and you'd not even notice?
I find the premise of a carefully re-compilable/re-creatable system very appealing, but not having a stable LTS style release rather incongruous. It takes a huge effort to get all the pieces working together - and if it's rolling and the sand is shifting/breaking underneath you it feels you never reach a meaningful stable system. Sure you can recreate your well tested working configuration, but the configurations is effectively immediately out of date and unmaintained once any packages are updated
I think this is why they effectively only target x64. I'm not a "distro guy" so maybe I'm missing something. It seems it'd be sensible to just 1-to-1 copy Ubuntu LTS package versions (+ patches) and build a NixOS "stable" version that can be patched and updated as people find issues
> I think this is why they effectively only target x64
Nix and Nixpkgs is the best in class when it comes to cross platform & cross architecture support. It has good support for x86_64 / aarch64 /macOS / Linux. Getting Musl or static variants of existing packages just work for many packages. There's even some work on BSD / Windows support. Cross compiling is far easier to setup compared to other package managers. If anything, other projects should be copying what Nix is doing.
NetBSD's pkgsrc has always done extremely well for me for that.
I'm not sure how feasible it would be to compare nixpkgs and pkgsrc given how different they are, but I'd encourage people who need that to poke around at both and see which one feels like a better fit for their use case.
Almost all of the changes flip an official setting. Those stay around for a long time and get a proper deprecation notice when they go away, so you won't be surprised. Replacing systemd-minimal with the full version may potentially cause some edge case issues, but it's the same package with more features enabled, so I wouldn't really expect any.
Nothing will break when the package gets updated as long as you keep to your specific release - backported changes are backwards compatible.
I find the premise of a carefully re-compilable/re-creatable system very appealing, but not having a stable LTS style release rather incongruous. It takes a huge effort to get all the pieces working together - and if it's rolling and the sand is shifting/breaking underneath you it feels you never reach a meaningful stable system. Sure you can recreate your well tested working configuration, but the configurations is effectively immediately out of date and unmaintained once any packages are updated
I think this is why they effectively only target x64. I'm not a "distro guy" so maybe I'm missing something. It seems it'd be sensible to just 1-to-1 copy Ubuntu LTS package versions (+ patches) and build a NixOS "stable" version that can be patched and updated as people find issues