NixOS is my only OS. My 21.05 install broke catastrophically a month or two ago – I could no longer boot the system, and had to reinstall. (GRUB offered me the usual menu of configurations, and I tried a few old ones as well as the most recent, but they had all stopped working.) That was shortly (a week? a month?) after I switched to nixos-unstable, and I’ve since suspected the two were related, but I’ll never know.
I’d like to have the most up-to-date software possible, but only subject to the condition that things don’t break. Would it be overly paranoid of me to stick with nixos-stable?
I track the latest stable release on my NixOS servers and even on Darwin. If there’s something I really want from nixos-unstable, I add it via an unstablePkgs attribute I pass in via specialArgs/extraSpecialArgs.
nixos-unstable is “unstable” because it makes no promises about which versions of packages will be in use. Stable versions try to only take bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise nixos-unstable is quite “stable”. It’s very odd that your system just stopped working. Can you post what went wrong?
I have been running nixos-unstable during the same time period and have did not encounter the same issue. I’m guessing the issue is relating to switching between 21.05 to unstable. It’s possible that nixos-rebuild did spit out an error but they can be hard to catch sometimes.
In my experience GRUB is pretty fragile since it depends on libraries living on /boot to be kept in exactly in sync with the grub EFI/binary you are using. GRUB also uses a configuration file on /boot that is generated by like 3 levels of shell scripts which can sometimes get messed up.
IMO systemd-boot is a lot simpler and less easily broken. You can enable it via the boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable option. It should work with all the normal boot options.
@nixinator ext4, only because that’s the default is in the installation section of the NixOS manual.
bad ram chips spring to mind
@nixinator I did install new memory in it – it had 8GB to start and now has 16GB – and the extra 8 were surely not from Dell (the computer is a 2017 Dell Inspiron).
Can you post what went wrong?
@ElvishJerricco Alas, I’m afraid I can’t provide more detail. I normally take copious notes in org-roam, but I guess I don’t when my system is down.
If there’s something I really want from nixos-unstable, I add it via an unstablePkgs attribute I pass in via specialArgs/extraSpecialArgs.
@Princemachiavelli Sonds good! I’ve currently got this in my configuration.nix file:
boot.loader = {
grub = {
enable = true;
version = 2;
devices = ["/dev/sda"]; # Where to put GRUB. "nodev" means EFI only.
# configurationLimit = 15; # TODO ? Enable to save memory,
# delete all but most recent history.
};
};
When you say “It should work with all the normal boot options,” I imagine you don’t mean I should leave those GRUB options in place and add boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable=true, right? Do you mean I can replace the GRUB section with the following?