My friend on discord keeps convincing me on how great Nix is, and interestingly enough, It does pique my attention now, the rollbacks, and the difference of it compared to every other distros.
Although one downside, my laptop really sucks in terms of compiling, so whenever it does stuff (for example, building crates on rust) it takes a lot of time. And I just wanna know if I can manage to survive + enjoy Nix with this specs that I got.
Most packages in nixpkgs are cached, which means in default configuration Nix will fetch binary versions of them, no rebuild required. What Nix allows you to do is to easily patch and rebuild packages if you want to, but you don’t have to do this on your machine. For example, you can leverage GitHub Actions to build and cache your packages using free GitHub CPUs.
But pretty much any nix operation involves nix creating a bunch of small files, which is the absolute disaster case for an HDD. I’ve used Nix on HDDs before. It’s unpleasant to say the least, even if you’re not compiling your own software. That said, I haven’t really used any other distros on HDDs, so I don’t know how much better they may or may not be.