My understanding is the main problem here is that the machines became effectively unbootable. This wouldn’t happen in nixos because if setup properly all core system files are handled by nixos itself. That being said obviously it depends on how a user manages their system.
nous@programming.dev 3 months ago
Ideally yes. All core files would be handled by nixos. Except I doubt that is how crowedstrike would work on nixos if it existed on nixos.
Crowedstrikes downloads and manages it own definition file that gets updated multiple times per day. It is this file that was malformed causing the driver to break. This needs to be updated regularly, more then other packages and so would very likely not be something managed by nix package manager but more treated as application data and outside the scope of the nix package manager.
This is how updates to steam and discord are handled in nixos. Only the core updater is packaged and the rest of the application is self managed. So there is a precedence for this behaviour on nixos (although these won’t break your system if a bad update happens as the files are in your user dir).