Thanks for your new comments!
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In principle, I avoided the grub because the information on the manual about UEFI systems.
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NixOS is fine, but most of the things, but sometimes is needs additional work for things that are simple on others distributions:
- For example, I work on Earth Sciences, and to contribute to ESMValTool, I had to do additional work (see How to install ESMValCore and ESMValTool in NixOS · Issue #354 · ESMValGroup/ESMValCore · GitHub).
- For Julia language, I was not able to have a good environment that can work as expected. In Debian or Arch linux, just I can smoothly use the package manager inside Julia to add/remove packages. In NixOS, I was NOT able to create a kind of environment that work smooth (Julia Pkgs in NixOS · Issue #20649 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub).
To overcome some issues, and to have a similar working environment that my colleges, I decided install other distribution in a new partition… As Ubuntu is the mandatory distribution in my job, Debian was a good choice. However, the installer gave some problems due to my motherboard (few components need not-free firmware with are not in the default DVD and need additional stuff, a bad choice of my hardware, not an issue of Debian that has a nice philosophy). So to solve the Julia language issue above, a friend was using Manjaro and at least at home I can use smoothly Julia.
My first approach was indeed containers and I tried lxc/lxd. It was successful to have a CLI environment, but I needed also a graphical one to visualize results of Julia calculations. I know that some people were able to have X-windows in containers, but most of the tips I found did not work directly in NixOS (and again I have to spend additional time that now I don’t have).
So, I am happy with NixOS, and it is my main distribution on the laptop and home-desktop but also it is true that you have to spend more energy for few tasks that are easier in others.
By the way, it is pretty easy to add a new entry to systemd manually and have other distribution that created a .efi file on your initial menu.
Thanks!