Best practice question about boot failures

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1

This is a general question, a noob seeking sage advice. With the latest change to the nvidia driver, I cannot launch a graphical session, so I need to boot into the prior generation. I am using flakes and home manager. I assume that there is a bug in the nvidia driver, since the system boots fine, it just hangs trying to switch to the graphical session. I assume that I need to wait for the next update or switch to the open source driver.

This isn’t a question about the nvidia problem per se (although advice on that is also welcome), but about how to proceed in my current situation, which I’ve faced a couple of times since I started using NixOS. Should I remove the generation that didn’t work, or leave it at the top of the boot list and keep manually selecting the second option until the problem is resolved? (A simple rebuild/switch at this point doesn’t resolve the problem.) Should I revert to the prior nixpkgs version in my flake and rebuild with that?

Thanks

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Personally I keep my config in git and revert broken commits ASAP. Otherwise you end up basing further config on broken code, using nix to manage config beyond quick debugging or fixing of boots just generally doesn’t sound like the best idea.

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That’s what I’ve been doing when a rebuild fails, which isn’t uncommon. Failing to start up properly after a successful rebuild/switch happens rarely, so just wondering if I should use a different approach.

Thanks.