When comparing NixOS vs Antergos, the Slant community recommends NixOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for misanthropes?” NixOS is ranked 55th while Antergos is ranked 65th. The most important reason people chose NixOS is:
Atomic non-destructive upgrades / rollback of a system upgrade / declarative reproducible system configuration / unprivileged installation of packages / transparent source or binary deployment.
Specs
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Pros
Pro State of the art package manager
Atomic non-destructive upgrades / rollback of a system upgrade / declarative reproducible system configuration / unprivileged installation of packages / transparent source or binary deployment.
Pro Minimal
You can start with a minimal environment and add packages and software to suit your needs as you go along.
Pro Reproducible system
NixOS is configured using the Nix package manager, allowing your system to be replicated and kept in sync across multiple machines. Great for keeping a laptop and desktop in sync.
Pro Robust
Packages don't break after a NixOS upgrade as they are prone to with other distros (especially Arch).
Pro Easy to install
ArchLinux is rather hard to install using command line. Antergos's advantage is the easy installation using a GUI.
So instead of manual installation of software you can just download Antergos which does things for you automatically.
Pro Rolling release model make it easy to keep apps on updated versions
Antergos is a rolling release distribution (as it's based on Arch Linux). Your entire system, from the base OS components to the applications that you install, will receive updates as they are released upstream—with only a minimal delay to ensure stability.
Pro Offers choice of desktop environment on installation
Ability to choose your preferred desktop environment on installation.
Pro It comes with every essential utility pre-installed
Pro Arch User Repository access
It can visit AUR to build packages.
Pro Offers minimal ISO download
Pro Surprisingly stable Linux desktop
From popular distros of rolling and standard releases, compared to Debian (stable) and Arch, Antergos stability rocks. Debian is stable, however, it's with old packages and Arch. The only thing that broke it, so far, was compiz-manjaro (C++ 0.9 branch) from AUR, but compiz in Antergos repositories is 0.8 and it is working flawlessly.
Pro First Linux desktop that makes Windows look bad
Antergos has very nice default themes (KDE/Plasma and Gnome/GTK), which combined with Compiz 0.8, makes Windows looks sad. Antergos can even compete with Windows in regards to stability.
Pro Excellent graphical package manager (Pamac)
Features include: providing notifications of available updates; mirror management; AUR support (with the option to suppress unnecessary confirmations during the install process); update settings (frequency, whether to check for updates from the AUR, packages to ignore updates for); and a history of packages installed, updated, or removed (from the official repositories - AUR packages are not currently tracked).
Pro Extremely fast
Everything runs at the speed of light. Antergos is super responsive and programs/apps runs effortlessly.
Cons
Con Documentation is not good
A lot of the documentation of various functions is buried on the source code, their respective manuals, or non-existent. The documentation, the conventions, and the scattered toolchain really made searching for stuff easily missable.
Con A configuration change might end up bricking your system
Con Antergos project has been discontinued (May 2019)
Con Package popularity is not visible in Antergos repositories
Small issue, but would be nice to see package popularity in Antergos repos, just like it is visible for AUR. packages.
Antergos with AUR gives access practically to all possible packages, so popularity could help in this sea of packages.
Con The installer breaks often
The installer, cnchi breaks all the time. It's very buggy.
Con Rolling release problems
Rolling release is quite pain sometimes. You might face some problem with a bugged application since you always get the latest version.
This problem is a little bit solved by Manjaro distro where applications are tested but updates are slower than usual.