When comparing VectorLinux Light vs NixOS, the Slant community recommends NixOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for an old machine?” NixOS is ranked 31st while VectorLinux Light is ranked 52nd. 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 Very low minimum requirements
Can run on 128MB RAM, although 256MB is recommended.
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).
Cons
Con Limited amount of software in repositories
While Vector Linux is good for common tasks, it contains a much smaller amount of software in its repositories compared to the mainstream distributions.
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.