I recommend first trying the Nix package manager on Arch to see how you like it. You can use it to install some things in your home directory without interfering with the Arch package manager.

If you want to make your OS to a hobby, choose NixOS.

If you want a system that just works, use Kinoite or Debian.

If you want cutting edge software but fear Arch/Endeavour is prone to breakage, consider doing file system snapshots e.g. with snapper which you can boot into.

some comments.

• both are absolutely fine for a university laptop, though very different.
• NixOS is more stable. It is almost impossible to brick it, you would have to delete every working old generation.
• nixpkgs is like arch repos plus AUR together. nixpkgs is actually one of the biggest repos if not the biggest repo at the moment. so no problems there.
• i mean, this is like highly subjective and my own opinion: go with NixOS, it's just a cooler OS imo and your system and your abilities will only get better with time. and it's fully reproducible by design, so almost every bit of work you put into it will be worth it, in some sense. i also believe that NixOS will become much much more relevant in the future. bigger community, better documentation, more resources!
• ...unless you don't want to put a lot of time in it in the beginning. it will most likely be really frustrating and it will distract you from other dtuff you want to do on your computer. like just getting browser email editor etc. you will have a setup no problem pretty quickly. it won't be more than just puttung the programs you need in your systempackages. but then you realize you need vpn, or a dropbox client, or some audio setup, and other stuff, and before you know it you are spending hours and hours or weeks trying to find out how this works... this is, i would say, the major "downside" of NixOS conpared to arch
• if you can afford trying it out and then switching to something else and starting over again, try out NixOS!

Arch based distros are easy AF. I've been on Linux for 2 years, I've tried 10+ distros, and Arch has been the easiest for me, and stable as it gets, while allowing me to get the latest drivers needed for gaming.

I've been using Crystal Linux, but got tired of it's CLI only package helper, and since then I've moved to Manjaro KDE.

Whatever you chose, make sure you get automatic BTRFS snapshots, so you can roll back at boot whenever you wreck it.

I've read here on Lemmy that NixOS is a great concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, stating that it's overly complicated and documentation is lacking.

If you only care about stability then you should go with Debian. If instead you want something that limits you so that you can't easily wreck it, you could use an immutable distro like Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue, BlendOS or Ubuntu Core Desktop.

All Linux distros can be unstable & really it all comes down to how you use your system....

Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.

For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.

What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, ~~although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.~~

Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don't have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.

What I didn't like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn't find easily.

like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I'll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox

Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it's not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.

Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn't added through the config file so there's no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.

Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it's an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it's supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.

Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn't have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn't even be doing.

Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I've been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.

At least I'm pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.

So since you've already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.

Depends on what you're doing at University. I was using Arch but an update caused CUDA to stop working so I couldn't work on an assignment. Why did it stop working? They updated CUDA to 12.3 days before updating the NVIDIA driver to a version which supported CUDA. The maintainers are mostly negligent and the community is rather toxic so I'd avoid Arch for that kind of thing. NixOS looks interesting and has lots of benefits however, for a dedicated University computer I would recommend using the most boring Linux distro available like Fedora or Ubuntu.

If you already using EndeavourOS, you are already using Arch. So it is a very odd question. You could remove the maybe 12 EndeavourOS packages and comment out the EndeavourOS repositories if you want to go truly vanilla Arch. Out of the 80,000 packages Arch makes available to you, about two-dozen are EndeavourOS specific. Once installed, they are effectively the same OS.

So, you are just asking if it worth it for an Arch user to move to NixOS.

From what I can tell, the killer feature of NixOS is rolling out a config to multiple machines. Is that worth a switch to you?

The other big attraction of both Arch and Nix is the huge package library but if you do not use the AUR today, that does not matter to you either.

Neither, rock solid Debian + flatpak for the latest software.

My honest opinion? Neither. Just go with something that works out of the box like Linux mint until you're done with school then you'll have time to mess with your system. That's what I did for a friend of mine when he went to college. Gave him a laptop with mint on it and never heard a single complaint from him. It has everything he needs. Focus on school now and worry about distros later.

Neither of both.

Both are more on the tinkerer-side, and for university you need something reliable and easy to use in my eyes.

And that might be Fedora Silverblue/ Atomic (or universal-blue.org to be more precise for QOL-tweaks).
It is definitely more simple, stable (release cycle) and also more reliable, since there's only one base (Fedora packages + your DE), and therefore less configuration variability.

I'd also lose access to the AUR

No, you wouldn't. Neither on Nix, nor on Fedora Atomic. Especially on Silverblue you layer and containerise a lot, and you can always use the pre-installed and self updating Distrobox to install Arch and use the AUR. That's also what I do, and it works fine, even though I almost never feel the urge to use it.