> While I love Arch's ethos, I think the next step in distributions is to embrace declarative configuration, non-destructive actions and reproducible packages. NixOS & GuixSD provide this. And luckily there's still a lot of Arch ethos in their implementations. Namely, that your base system is totally barebones and you need to add (declare!) whatever you want to have.

Probably the only reason I haven't given NixOS a chance beyond fiddling with it for a day or two is that I can't run binaries that weren't built from nix packages. I understand that this is essentially the whole point of the distro, but there are some times when using a downloaded binary is essentially unavoidable for me, so I'd love to be able to just say "let me use this binary, and I'll accept the fact that it'll get removed if I ever rebuild my system from scratch or go back to a previous build (even one that was built after I installed it)". It's possible that this is feasible but I just don't know how to do it, but unfortunately it's somewhat of a dealbreaker for me.