Then the deal needs to be changed. Contracts are not above the law 🤷

The nixos-unstable channel actually does ensure a minimum set of required packages work: Those that would prevent you from booting. The compiling-from-source is because Hydra (the binary cache) only starts building once a package appears in nixpkgs-unstable, and if it immediately proceeds into nixos-unstable, or one of its dependencies is different there, that build won’t be finished yet. release- and versioned nixos- don’t have that problem, as they have a merge freeze, and are mostly fast-forwarded along unstable.

What would be good is a mechanism for Hydra to tell you “I tried to build this derivation, and it failed.” For this, Nix first needs to store build failure, and since store paths are input-addressed by default, you can also skip builds that will certainly still fail.

I used to use an old consumer Yoga, and now a new ThinkPad. Some say it’s the wrong way around, I say I want more than 2 cores and 8GiB of RAM. (Un-)Fortunately, I got hooked on the Nix and Tiling-WM drugs quite soon, and so there wasn’t a lot of distrohopping.

Not Linux, and of course the perfect OS.

You should try it, to get a taste of what is possible, then learn what to do, and maybe even stay. But it’s not for beginners, the terminal-phobic, or people that rarely use their PC.

It doesn’t need fiddling, but it invites you to do so. And the default setup is hardly a best practice: swap on a partition, no FDE, no zram… missing FDE in particular will require you to reinstall, and you better have found out how to do proper backups including metadata.

Arch

I personally use a TPM with Measured Boot (so it doesn‘t give the key to external disks), and have a YubiKey and password as fallback options.