When comparing Nix os vs openSUSE Tumbleweed, the Slant community recommends Nix os for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for a backend developer?” Nix os is ranked 4th while openSUSE Tumbleweed is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Nix os is:
It has all of hackage in it's package manager (which is confusingly named "nix" as well) due to being based around hashing and allowing you to compile in a sort of virtual machine (really just changing the PATH variable temporarily) it solves many of the versioning problems that you commonly have with cabal. Here's a tutorial (there's many others as well) http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~bernardy/nix.html. Also I should note that you can use the package manager a la carte on Mac and most any linux distro.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for Haskell development
It has all of hackage in it's package manager (which is confusingly named "nix" as well) due to being based around hashing and allowing you to compile in a sort of virtual machine (really just changing the PATH variable temporarily) it solves many of the versioning problems that you commonly have with cabal. Here's a tutorial (there's many others as well) http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~bernardy/nix.html.
Also I should note that you can use the package manager a la carte on Mac and most any linux distro.
Pro Upgrading the system is extremely reliable
Since NixOS stores all its packages in isolation from each other in /nix/store
and because of the declarative configuration model, upgrading NoxOS systems is extremely reliable. Furthermore, it gives you the ability to roll back upgrades.
Pro Extremely reproducible state of installation
Every package in your system is generated from a configuration file. This makes it very easy to reproduce that environment. Just copy the config file into a new machine and it's done.
Pro Versatile snapshot system
You can use and test snapshots without rebooting. Booting into snapshots or test configurations is possible without risking the system's stability.
Pro Has docker like system built in
Pro Allows parallel configurations for multiple projects
As everything is isolated, you can have on the same machine multiple configurations to meet project requirements that would be mutually exclusive on other OSes.
Pro Stable
Tumbleweed is stable enough to use every day. Updates are OpenQA tested to ensure stability before being released for Tumbleweed. Bleeding edge untested software can be tried using OpenSUSE factory.
Pro Easy installation and cutting edge apps
Pro A large amount of software
Pro Tumbleweed + OpenSUSE Build Service
Pro Good selection of preinstalled applications
Pro User friendly + Good support
Active and friendly user community, updates come fast
Cons
Con The configuration language is hard to figure out
For good reason. It's a purely functional language. However not even close to bash.
Con Little / no third-party support
Like it or not, most third parties don't want to deal with less-popular distros. So most of them only support Ubuntu LTS and those versions of RHEL/CentOS that are still supported.