Heck even moving it to another partition isn’t really a re-install as it’ll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you’ll have to move over /home manually, though).
And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc’ed the old stuff. It’s practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it’s installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.
Oh just one thing: Don’t skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you’ll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.
Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It’s a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.
Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it’s probably more stable these days.
Why would you reinstall NixOS, like, ever?
Heck even moving it to another partition isn’t really a re-install as it’ll happily create the exact 1:1 same system based on nothing but the configuration file, change nothing but the id of the root partition (you’ll have to move over /home manually, though).
And if you mess up your configuration either roll back instantly, or fix it in situ in case you already gc’ed the old stuff. It’s practically impossible to get it into a non-booting state without literally ripping out the disk it’s installed on (or, well, Windows messing up the bootloader or something). Even if you run unstable on the whole system every single commit on that branch is tested to not break boot and rollback.
Oh just one thing: Don’t skimp on the size of your EFI partition. 100M are definitely borderline when you have both NixOS and Windows booting from it, those kernels and initrds have gotten quite large over the years and you’ll need to be able to fit, bare minimum, two of both.
Yeah, depending on your definition of reinstall you either reinstall NixOS never or on every boot. There’s no in-between.
Just moved from Endeavor to NixOS. It’s a huge learning curve and takes a while to build your config or flakes, but damn does it feels nice to just roll back if you mess up over re-installing.
Because I made it unbootable by doing something dumb or one of its tools was horribly broken and made my system unbootable? :) This was years ago, though, it’s probably more stable these days.