When comparing NixOS vs CRUX, the Slant community recommends NixOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distros?” NixOS is ranked 18th while CRUX is ranked 26th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Ports
It uses the BSD ports system as package manager.
Pro Very BSD/UNIX-like
Pro Learning
Nice if you want to learn some stuff about Linux.
Pro Very knowledgeable and helpful user comunity via IRC
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 Very small user community
Con KISS
You have to do everything by yourself, there are no helpers!