I can only speak anecdotally, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been unlucky with this particular box, but I’ve seen a few quite serious issues going back over the past few years since I switched to NixOS as my primary OS.
Not so long ago there was some sort of problem with Hydra builds for a recent version of Node. That seemed to result in trying to build the whole thing locally on every update, taking a huge amount of time and then typically failing there as well.
I’ve seen things with Nvidia drivers vs Linux kernel versions as well. We did have a specific reason for choosing Nvidia for that particular workstation, but otherwise, I’d agree with popular advice to get AMD if you’re building a Linux box, just based on the frequency and severity of Nvidia driver issues we’ve seen here.
I’ve seen a few issues with Ubuntu upgrades over the years as well, and wouldn’t necessarily rate that much higher for stability. That’s always surprised me because IME Debian Stable is the gold standard — something I’ve trusted with our production servers for well over a decade now, from unattended upgrades to several major new releases, and barely seen a flicker of a hint of anything breaking in all that time. To be fair, I haven’t used Debian much on workstations, so I don’t know whether the kinds of issues I’ve experienced with NixOS and Ubuntu would have been more common if I had.
Not so long ago there was some sort of problem with Hydra builds for a recent version of Node. That seemed to result in trying to build the whole thing locally on every update, taking a huge amount of time and then typically failing there as well.
I’ve seen things with Nvidia drivers vs Linux kernel versions as well. We did have a specific reason for choosing Nvidia for that particular workstation, but otherwise, I’d agree with popular advice to get AMD if you’re building a Linux box, just based on the frequency and severity of Nvidia driver issues we’ve seen here.
I’ve seen a few issues with Ubuntu upgrades over the years as well, and wouldn’t necessarily rate that much higher for stability. That’s always surprised me because IME Debian Stable is the gold standard — something I’ve trusted with our production servers for well over a decade now, from unattended upgrades to several major new releases, and barely seen a flicker of a hint of anything breaking in all that time. To be fair, I haven’t used Debian much on workstations, so I don’t know whether the kinds of issues I’ve experienced with NixOS and Ubuntu would have been more common if I had.