If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and trying something completely different, changing kernels on NixOS almost feels like cheating; Flip a number in your config, rebuild, reboot.
Changed your mind? Pick the previous boot-entry after another reboot, and you're back. Might wanna rebuild with the previous kernel chosen again, or else the new one boots next time around.
As I was reluctant going all in, having kept them in git since 2012, I still keep a few of them in their own separate repository. I load them as a nix flake input, and put the files in the expected place using nixos. Works OK, but adds a bit of a roundtrip if you are experimenting with changes often.
This also allows me to share some of them to my work machine, which uses nix, and other files on other systems that dont.
That said, I consider myself all in nix quite some time ago, and have moved more and more of the config over to the nix repo using the nix language for config instead of the input flake config file approach. Iterating on it is much faster this way.
It’s quite some time ago, but I believe it ignores files named “.editorconfig” (if you have it in your repo/folder), which ended up doing something wierd in editorconfig-mode (or what it’s called) when tramp was running.
I put mine as zsh autoloads. This way feels almost as light as creating aliases once set ut, and also allows for the scripts to have slow initializing code and still be readily available, without having to load everything immediately when zshrc loads and wait for it all the time, even when you might not need it.
I’ve done similar things for mismatched python dependencies in a broken Airflow setup on GCP, and got amazingly good results pointing me in the right direction to resolve the conflicting package versions. Just dumped a mile long stack trace and the full requirements.txt on it. Often worth a shot, tbh
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and trying something completely different, changing kernels on NixOS almost feels like cheating; Flip a number in your config, rebuild, reboot.
Changed your mind? Pick the previous boot-entry after another reboot, and you're back. Might wanna rebuild with the previous kernel chosen again, or else the new one boots next time around.