My worst one was accidentally overwriting my backup when trying to clone it.

I was using a standalone drive cloning device and I mixed up the “source” and “target” slots. It was a 4tb drive so the operation took about 3 hours.

At the end, i plugged in the clone to check it and saw that it was blank. I ended up having to make a new backup before i was able to try the cloning again.

Since it was a backup, nothing of value was lost, but it sure was a waste of an afternoon

RHEL comes with very limited repos, so this might help: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/

They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.

Gentoo has cflags and cross-building

Nix has Nix configs

I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it’s no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.

I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo’s mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.

it’s only distros