Damn this made me read a lot about this specific derailment, but also about Puget Sound, Salish Sea, Positive train control and all this 220-MHz stuff.
Keep trying out new things, new things don't work as I want so I wanna go back to how things were and have to manually "rollback" stuff (see deleting files, changing configs). Also managed to screw up the bootloader and partitions on more than one time. I'm not gonna pretend I'm an expert, I just want a simple system, which Arch really is. But sometimes too simple, requires a lot of reading and understanding, which is usually not a problem, but sometimes it is.
One recent example was me trying out KDE Plasma. Usually I use AwesomeVM but the HN thread about the new Plasma version made me try it out in Arch. After the install and trying to use it for a while, I wanted to go back.
Uninstalling the package(s) is not enough, as it already has been overwriting bunch of stuff and changed configs that are not being rolled back after uninstalling.
Still to this day KRunner launches (via some d-bus command or something like that) when I do my Super+R shortcut, which usually runs the AwesomeVM launcher, not KRunner. Haven't figured out how to get rid of it yet, but got other stuff to do right now, so simply living with it for now.
With NixOS, I'd just reboot and select the previous version where KDE Plasma was never installed.
I feel like the problems you're citing (inability to simply roll back, etc.) aren't really Arch problems specifically—you'd have them in any traditional distro (like Debian) too, right?
Oh yes, absolutely, I'd surely screw up equally often if I was using Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distribution, if not more. I was just comparing Arch to NixOS as Arch is my daily driver, while I'm evaluating the switch to NixOS.
I even "DE hopped" using NixOS, trying out 3+ different DEs for fun, and once I was done I just had to revert to an older generation, no nasty leftovers.
I use NixOS unstable on my desktop/work machine, but when I just started using NixOS, I even regularly hopped between the latest stable release and unstable.
Another fun related feature: NixOS really only requires /nix and /boot to boot. So, some of us just nuke everything except /nix, /boot, and /home on boot:
The issue wasn't the system broke, in fact, my system was doing pretty much alright.
The problem was: in the AUR, lots of packages didn't built or launch, and even in the official repos, some packages were missing libraries or just not having the right versions.
I was tired of tinkering to get everything to work as I wanted.
The problem was: in the AUR, lots of packages didn't built or launch,
I used Arch for a while before NixOS. Another problem I encountered with the AUR is that, since the AUR is not built as a single consistent system with Arch itself, often packages from AUR would start failing because some library was upgraded in Arch and the newer version was ABI-incompatible with the version that the AUR package was compiled with.
Out of curiosity what do you think of how Arch and NixOS compare to Debian or Ubuntu? (I'm asking to help me calibrate against what you're saying since I've used all of these except NixOS.)
Imho, Arch is a similar style to Debian/Ubuntu but different package manager and slightly different semantics in a few places. NixOS is radically different and if you can make it work for you, you’ll likely be much happier after the learning curve. If however your needs are just outside the norms enough, NixOS could also just as well be very frustrating. It’s one of those things you’ve gotta try and invest a reasonable amount of time in, which might not pay off, but if it does, could pay off big (or so the marketing pitch goes).
Just out of interest, I tried "electronics packaging" (which other sources seem to indicate is called either "habillage" or "packaging" in French). I got this http://m.gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=1893553... result which says "electronics packaging designer" translates to "concepteur d'assemblage électronique." So now I'm not sure what to think. The suggested translation doesn't include the word "habillage" which I previously thought was the term I needed.
"Habillage" (literally "dressing") in this context relates to packaging of a concept/proposition i.e. the marketing around it (or "spin"). The french word for "packaging" in the physical sense would be "emballage" (literally "wrapping"). Some would use "empaquetage" but that is less common.
So "electronics packaging" would translate to "emballage/empaquetage de composants électroniques".
"The brand Schroff, which belongs to the business unit of nVent Technical Solutions, has been a world leader in electronics packaging for over five decades."
"La marque Schroff, qui appartient à l’entité légale nVent, est leader mondial dans le domaine de l’habillage électronique depuis plus de cinquante ans."
This makes it look extremely like habillage doesn't just mean what you claim it does "in this context."
Emballage was indeed my initial guess for the appropriate French word, but I, you know, did some research before jumping to a conclusion?
Thanks!