Mutter is made by GNOME, what do you expect?

Then the deal needs to be changed. Contracts are not above the law 🤷

The nixos-unstable channel actually does ensure a minimum set of required packages work: Those that would prevent you from booting. The compiling-from-source is because Hydra (the binary cache) only starts building once a package appears in nixpkgs-unstable, and if it immediately proceeds into nixos-unstable, or one of its dependencies is different there, that build won’t be finished yet. release- and versioned nixos- don’t have that problem, as they have a merge freeze, and are mostly fast-forwarded along unstable.

What would be good is a mechanism for Hydra to tell you “I tried to build this derivation, and it failed.” For this, Nix first needs to store build failure, and since store paths are input-addressed by default, you can also skip builds that will certainly still fail.

Not Linux, and of course the perfect OS.

You should try it, to get a taste of what is possible, then learn what to do, and maybe even stay. But it’s not for beginners, the terminal-phobic, or people that rarely use their PC.

It doesn’t need fiddling, but it invites you to do so. And the default setup is hardly a best practice: swap on a partition, no FDE, no zram… missing FDE in particular will require you to reinstall, and you better have found out how to do proper backups including metadata.

Arch

Funnily enough, XNU (the macOS kernel) is actually UNIX.