Why I Dual Boot Arch Linux and NixOS (And You Shouldn't)

The Setup

I run Arch Linux on one partition and NixOS on another. Same machine. Same keyboard. Different philosophies. Different package managers. Different everything.

Why? Because I couldn't decide.

Arch: The Sports Car

Arch is fast. Pacman is fast. The AUR has everything. When I need to spin up a Rust project with the latest nightly compiler and some obscure Solana CLI tools that only three people use, Arch has my back.

But Arch is also... fragile. One bad pacman -Syu and you're chrooting from a USB stick at 2 AM, wondering where your evening went.

NixOS: The Tank

NixOS is the opposite. Everything is declarative. My entire system config is a single configuration.nix. If my laptop explodes, I can rebuild my exact environment on new hardware in 20 minutes.

But NixOS is also... stubborn. Want to run a binary that wasn't packaged for Nix? Good luck. The learning curve is a cliff face.

The Verdict

I use Arch when I'm experimenting. NixOS when I'm shipping. Both have taught me more about Linux than any single distro ever could.

Would I recommend this setup? Absolutely not. One OS is enough for any sane person. But I'm a developer — sanity was never in the job description.