NixOS does let you do that, but somehow I goofed it so hard I couldn’t even do that. Most of the time my issues arrived when tinkering with the bootloader, so outcomes like that are to be expected.

100% I’m biased, you chuck a person who can’t swim into the deep end and they’ll be terrified of water for life. With Arch being my first distro, this sorta thing happened to me. I just skipped the usual debian-based stepping stones new Linux users traverse. You’re totally right though, you can have a reliable system with almost anything debian-based. But again, for me I can’t use debian due to the old packages. I have tried it, didn’t like it. I like Fedora, it’s not reliable enough for me. Fedora Atomic fixes that.

This is not astroturfing though. Just me and my views based on past experiences.