nix flake update
nixos-rebuild --switch --flake .
# Just to keep an update history
git add flake.lock
git commit -m "update"
This may seem like too much work, but it guarantees an all-or-nothing procedure. If some package is broken, the entire upgrade process is canceled, and the system remains in the state that it was.
I have had a couple of partial upgrade cases on Arch. It was not fun live booting to repair it, every time this happened.
I’ve had updates fail on NixOS. A kernel update didn’t generate the initramfs and the system wouldn’t boot. Booting to a previous generation and reapplying the update fixed it.
This is very rare, though, and unlike Arch can be fixed without a Live USB.
This sounds like a bug on Nix configuration, or the kernel build process.
If NixOS had caught the error, you wouldn’t have gotten a faulty generation at all. This is different from pacman/apt/dnf, which will happily continue the upgrade, resulting in a broken system with no easy way to fix it.
nix flake update nixos-rebuild --switch --flake . # Just to keep an update history git add flake.lock git commit -m "update"This may seem like too much work, but it guarantees an all-or-nothing procedure. If some package is broken, the entire upgrade process is canceled, and the system remains in the state that it was.
I have had a couple of partial upgrade cases on Arch. It was not fun live booting to repair it, every time this happened.
I’ve had updates fail on NixOS. A kernel update didn’t generate the initramfs and the system wouldn’t boot. Booting to a previous generation and reapplying the update fixed it.
This is very rare, though, and unlike Arch can be fixed without a Live USB.
This sounds like a bug on Nix configuration, or the kernel build process.
If NixOS had caught the error, you wouldn’t have gotten a faulty generation at all. This is different from pacman/apt/dnf, which will happily continue the upgrade, resulting in a broken system with no easy way to fix it.