I’ll never understand why some people have the need to constantly fiddle with their OS install. But, different strokes for different folks.
Look at Mr. “I have something better to do than build compilation queues for LibreOffice” over here.
In between gaming and gooning theres just no time left in the day for anything else.
/S
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Boredom, I spent whole summer (2022 or 2023) just installing different Linux distributions, I was in highschool and I was bored during summer break and my laptop was kinda slow with windows 10 so I decided to try Linux and was spending whole summer just installing Linux distributions and playing around. Now I use Linux mint because it is easy to setup and works.
Tinkering to Mint enlightenment pipeline.
Fiddling is how you find out what’s possible and what you like.
NixOS – now I’ve finally found the endgame distro!
several days later CachyOS is actually much simpler.
NixOS’ learning curve is brutal.
This is why you need to have 2 computers. One to run a boring distro that just works. And the other one for installing distros that you can ride for fun as it goes down in flames.
The best of both worlds.
Tune Arch ONCE. Sets you for life
and also back up in case a borked package(s) appears in an update
Until you switch laptops or upgrade your PC parts.
In this economy? Really, GreenBeanMachine?
Nix
No
Yes
Come to the dark side, we’ve got new Plasma, and exhausting manual configuration
It’s there to solve your “This is boring” issue without having to do all of the system configuration stuff manually*.
I was able to package a nightly AppImage as if it were installed normally like an app, and I could reinstall the system if I wanted to, and it’d still be there. NixOS is the opposite of manual dependency resolution, it’s dependency heaven. You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society. You can write a configuration file that does everything. You can do anything with NixOS. NixOS is the one true god, all hail NixOS—
Ah, I see why you may not want to use it. Consider it though, it’s genuinely good and trying doesn’t hurt.
I haven’t even told you about nix-comma or nix helper (nh) yet. May the, uh, flake be with you.
*You do have to write the config files, though you can just adapt someone else’s configuration.
You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society.
The NixOS-communist intersectionality is something I never expected to come across, but it makes so much sense lmao. This is 100% true.
nix
I adore the idea of nix. I fucking hate the syntax with a passion.
oh use the
.packagesbut only for this else use a flake and if you want dot files there is this other completely different thing with home manager but if you want this extra config customization or a custom system script then you need to make a derrivatio…its so damn exhausting.
I just want a list of packages.
That I can put in modules.
And turn them on and off based on the computer I’m on.
And if they are on they should use these dots.
And not look like a spaghetti bowl made of curly braces sourced from json derulos left buttock.
And the system should also have some additional sbctl hooks because we still have not figured out that dracut generated initramfs files don’t get purged from the database so I have to have a custom hook to not get error messages every time I
paruahahahAAHAHA…anyway dcli exists and is a fine middle ground.
The biggest thing that helped me with nix is to realize the syntax is shit because the language is veryyyy different. Entirely expression based, nearly pure functional programing. Everything is a set.
Once I understood that it was much simpler, and worth the time. I never worry about system configuration anymore it just works, and it’ll keep working unless I choose to change something in my system flake
fasc shitshow unfortunately
Guix then
definitely!
Just use Fedora. It just works.
That’s literally Bazzite in this chart
I meant Fedora Workstation.
But even so, “it just works” = “this is boring!”
NixOS manages to be all of these at once except the manual dependency management
NixOS is indirect manual dependency management.
And to cover complexity, I just let an LLM do most of the work - it knows more about NixLang than me anyway (though I can read it).
Idk I’ve been on Slackware for 10 years… And I’ve just ended up learning how to use the OS and change things as I please.
I love that Slackware still exists, and try every new release.
It works as a daily driver and after initial setup is less of a hassle than people think, but I also can’t really find any good reason to use it over more modern distros.Valid. I really like that the whole system is held up with a bunch of bash scripts. Which is not a plus for a lot of people.
I came up on Slackware, used it exclusively from like ‘96 - 08’. Have not touched it since. I have fond memories of debugging XFree86.conf and compiling half of what I installed from source. 🤣 This is a wild slack themed day- I just ran into a Bob Dobbs picture in the wild. 😂
A wild Bob is calling you 🤣 Tbh I’ve not debugged a config like that in so long, since like 10 and I was a wee lad. Most things just work now. I’ve also been using Wayland and pipewire.
Do people really be using Slackware these days? I’m on Bazzite atm and it’s cool but a bit different esp with the ostree stuff.
Curious what the use case is for Slackware nowadays
A few thousand people in the world, yes.
It combines the stability of Debian with the simplicity of Arch, and turns both up to 11.
Main selling point is that it never does anything unexpected.
You set it up and then it works the way you’re used to, literally for decades.Slack is great when you need to make something completely out of the ordinary. It’s right there just one step removed from a system from scratch without GNU.
That said, embedded computers nowadays run full Debian. So I dunno what use it still has.
Feeling superior to Gentoo and Arch users.
I see the main use case for Slackware, if you’re a Linux graybeard, who has used it for 20 years.
And in the center of the graph you can find Fedora.
Far from perfect but the exact middle groundPick a side bruh
No. Is there an Italian distro?
ArcheOS
So.Di.Linux
BOINC.Italy Linux Distro (BILD)
DEFT Linux
Sabayon Linux
openmamba
Installed gentoo on my desktop, never looked back
And once you do this there’s distcc for the laptops
For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh
Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static package store without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. For instance, imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop
How did you realize that? Hasn’t been my experience on Debian and Ubuntu at all, they always just worked for me, and that’s despite running a bunch of PPAs for GPU stuff on my Ubuntu install.
By ubuntu blowing up 3 times over a decade when I tried distro upgrade? Arch requires you to turn a wrench periodically, but keeping upgraded is nowhere as risky.
Interesting. It seems your mileage truly varies when it comes to distro stability.
But have you tried Gentoo?
Yes. I tried it for 6 months. Terrible. Takes way too long to compile
Yeah 8+ cores required. Update while you sleep.
I think Nix is better used for things like servers instead of a daily driver PC. Having to fuck with config files for my laptop/desktop would be a nightmare that I refuse to go through. I’ve been playing with Nix on a home server and I’m loving it for that. With a limited scope on what actually needs to be installed it makes managing the configs possible.
It makes sense if you have several computers, where you want the same setup.
I have several computers I actively use, but they all run different operating systems and different software. There’s typically a main machine, a vintage machine, and an experimental one. I like the variety.
Many people do ‘config files’ with Ansible, or at least with some kinda dotfiles hosted on their Github. This way, firstly, setting up a new machine takes maybe an hour mostly because of downloading all the packages. Secondly, no need to guess what settings one has changed somewhere years ago, since they’re all written down in these files.
It’s actually very convenient if one adds things to the configs gradually when the need arises.
A centralized config? Beautiful.
That can be done in regular distros with Ansible.
The main thing that keeps me from going back to it is how much I hate manually setting up an encrypted logical volume over multiple disks with BTRFS snapshotting.
Fedora is just a straight line, as I’ve found.
