I think I just reached the point where my NixOS is configured exactly as I want, so now the system just works and works without me changing anything. 😭 I’m gonna have to start having sex since I can no longer justify it on the lack of time.
You mean, spend 4-6 days tearing your hair out, before landing on a solution which evaluates to literally the same output as your current version, but is 10% cleaner and more elegant?
Of course you do, after all, that satisfies that itch. Well. For a while, anyways...
I am one of those people, but I'm still annoyed when my tools don't work right. I hate having to fix something, only to find out that my tool I need for that also needs repairs. I use my computer's primarily as tools, so I almost always am at least a little annoyed when my computer demands attention all of a sudden.
Maybe there are others that are hobbyists. I guess if you're a computer tinkerer primarily, troubleshooting that crap can be like cultivating a zen garden, but it is the opposite for me.
back when i used to get burgled regularly, it was great. forced us out of the flat for a while before the insurance came in, far better than wasting time on pointless computance.
Yeah, that's me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I've only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it's nice.
Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.
Ah, thankfully I didn't run into that one. I have a goxlr and they broke it for 2 weeks so I did a manual rollback until it was fixed, because having audio is kinda nice.
The default web interface doesn't do it and the images are not tagged in a way that you could easily fix it with CSS. You could possibly do it with a greasemonkey script (see your local LLM).
Haha, you overestimate me, I'm struggling with trying to change the colors in CSS, trying to hide images or whatnot would be like asking a monkey to change the timing belt of a car engine.
I figured out the "collapse inline media" thing about 2 months ago... after almost 2 decades of reddit use... about 3 weeks before I deleted my account...
Oh well, at least I got to enjoy it for a wee bit there
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.
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 adore the idea of nix. I fucking hate the syntax with a passion.
oh use the .packages but 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 paru ahahahAAHAHA...
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
Boring is good indeed. I'm running Bazzite on both my gaming desktop as well as my work laptop (webdev). The only reason I think about Bazzite at all is because I see it mentioned everywhere and feel the need to share my experience. Otherwise, it really is out of sight, out of mind.
Yup. I agree. Immutable distros save me from myself and endless tweaking.
I have it on my gaming laptop and my gaming desktop. I'll be throwing it on my wife's gaming desktop soon enough.
The core files are read-only. You can layer new system applications, but it's not as easy as just installing a package. Most things are handled via Flatpaks. So the base is solid and you can't do much to really ruin the stability.
There is a learning curve, as it's different than normal distros.
Bazzite. An immutable^[1]^ distro pre-configured for gaming.
::: spoiler [1]
The root system is one image and can't be altered.
Software is installed from a GUI software center via flatpak.
A bit like Android.
:::
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tried that, but my autism didn't like it.
The fact that YaST and the KDE settings had overlapping functionality, a GUI package manager frontend that shows you options you aren't supposed to use in Tumbleweed, and it being the only modern distro that couldn't install my printer-scanner-combo automatically drove me off.
Ye, its another "software-center" now called myrlyn. I still use sudo zypper for everything and I like the sudo zypper dup for updating your machine and make sure everything on both drivers and software related is updated by the distro it self, so you don't end up with mitchmatches here and there. Also the snap funktion for rollback by default is epic.
For me, I didn't like patterns (or the work-arounds). A shame because it (or now, maybe slowroll) might be closer to what I'm looking for, especially if the talk of smoke-testing is true. (though I've also seen someone say that Zypper is slow)
I like some of what I've seen with NixOS, though I see quite a few things that make it seem like not the answer either. And some of the things (like distrobox) seem like they probably add weight to updating as well (and/or clunkiness, if I have to manually do it).
Also some of my issue is I'm still running a 1050Ti (and Arch putting the legacy drivers on the AUR, a bit of a pain for me... not sure if that has changed though), I know that'd likely be even worse on Nix as well.
EDIT: I've tried Flatpak for user apps as well, and needing to download graphics drivers again really defeats the purpose.
Ideally I'd like something that has an update system intended for slower internet. Something that can pull (/keep) slightly older dependencies when user-land stuff is a bit slow, or outright delay/reschedule possibly-broken (for any number of reasons) updates rather than wasting a user's time and bandwidth. Guessing it doesn't exist, though (or if it does, it has some other huge workflow flaw).
Mentioning @[email protected] because they've talked about Tumbleweed and Nix.
It’s pretty easy to uninstall and make certain packages taboo
I remember reading that you couldn't turn it off unless you outright disabled recommended packages. Reading again, I see conflicting statements and it seems like a common thing people take issue with. Though even locking seems to me like it should just be something that happens during explicit removal, if that is a fix.
So I still kind of hate stuff like that.
Making a system either unresponsive or worse, broken. I feel it would be a workflow nightmare of a scale that would beggar belief and it would need constant attention from the maintainers…Something we’d probably not see in our lifetimes
My system is currently outdated and mostly usable, but has 4 different application issues (1 crash, 1 flicker, 1 compiling/library error, 1 feature error)... before I stopped updating, rolling updates gave me a few bad rolls that did not fix some of these issues (and if I'd have rolled not even week later w/o reading the news, I would've been toasted into terminal-fix-it-now-land).
So I'd say there's a lot of room for improvement here. I dream of something that works like this:
bin.fast: Major.minor.greatest, 7..30 days
bin.stable: Major.minor.greatest, 30..180 days
userspace: any version (including non-system package formats), total install/non-shared-dependencies size may influence update frequency (or budget)
small things may update always, big programs may even get to the point where it switches the install over to a bin version for you rather than compiling again
userspace packages may also slow down dependencies
Non-critical applications may be updated less. Security updates or marked-as-needed-fix more.
Alternatively, supporting explicit branches (like Godot's 3.X and 4.X) in official repos helps.
Maintenance updates (nothing known broken) may be delayed if something seems/is-known wrong (build-bots, user reports or comments, upstream fix needed or dependency too new, admin/maintainer intervention etc)
Ultimately, this could mean an update about every week or slower than once a month depending on packages and if the user encounters issues or not. And I'm sure this may be possible with some package system, but again not something default (and less effective if a package system doesn't provide the needed structure/information).
Hardware wise, yeah I'm otherwise still pretty happy with the performance level I have (and it's a fine target for my own stylized projects, still working on that). A smaller(+more efficient) system would be nice, but GPUs seem to still be behind/lower-value than CPUs though. Polaris would be fine just to make things easier though, not that I want to buy a sidestep especially when the market is so stagnant. Same thing with workarounds that won't be really cheaper either (esp, w/RAM etc pricing).
This is why I am very careful to use a small amount of them as there are a few apps
What I'm talking about was an issue with 1 package due to sandboxing, and it was Krita IIRC (something I don't care about sandboxing on). I think KDE stuff was being pulled in too (I don't use it, but I do use Kate and few other things that use Qt).
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.
Tumbleweed somehow gives me the newest Plasma with neither configuration nor manual dependency resolution exhaustion. It is not perfect either but it squares the circle of a stable rolling release distro surprisingly well.
Opensuse is also great: Like Fedora its rpm-based and backed by a corpo and with Tumbleweed you'll get a nice rolling release experience without worries that it's gonna bork itself
Fedora is the best. My friend who recently started using Linux persuades me to install NixOS (which I've already tried 2 years ago), but I really can't leave Fedora. Everything just works and are up to date.
For my bare metal personal systems, I just use Debian stable with backports. When that does not suffice, I manually build and install things from source.
@mech I use Void Linux on my old laptop from 2007 and it's fine enough for me. If I'll change Windows to Linux on my main PC though, I'll pick something Debian-based (but not Ubuntu-based), because I need something balanced and with lots of software available to download.
Debian Testing kinda sucks, it's like the worst of both worlds of Debian and Arch; updates for some packages can be held back for months because of some blocker, while stable at least gets fastracked to important fixes for security or system stability, and Sid just naturally gets them faster because it's more up to date. Sid is probably better overall, but why use an unstable rolling release without all the convenience that Arch's tools offer? AFAIK pacman is really nice for stuff like making your own packages. Plus it has a much larger user base than Debian Sid, which helps when you're looking for a fix for recent issues.
I've found Testing works rather well as a compromise. It's actually very stable, while most of the time, constantly updating. It's only during freeze time it stops noticeably changing. At unfreeze, there is a load at once, but it's yet to be a real problem for me in like 15y. SID is a bit too bleeding edge for my liking. The Arch and SID guys can be on the front line, that's fine. I thank them for their service, but I don't want it quite as interesting as that.
Well, you do you. My Debian Testing install was my only bare metal install that ever broke because of an update (not to say that Arch etc. would have been any better, I just haven't been using rolling release distros since then).
Well that is always the risk from moving from stable anything. It is called Testing after all, and I have found and reported things a few times. I just had nothing I couldn't fix and wasn't fixed later. As I said, it's about right for me. I put most people, and any servers, only on Stable.
I think Cinnamon might even be one of the first desktops other than the big two that is going to be finished (more or less) with Wayland support.
Personally, I have been using window managers for years. You'd think that would make the transition easier (sway is even explicitly designed as a drop-in replaced for i3wm), but you need to configure so many of the tools around it (task/statusbar, screensaver/lockscreen, clipboard manager ...) and I just couldn't be bothered. I'm definitely past that "tinker with all the things"-stage of being a Linux user ...
Agreed. I use Arch, Debian, and Mint with Xfce on all of them. It's stable as a rock in every iteration.
That being said, Debian's the distro famous for out of date packages, so its a little silly that Mint has it beat in this regard, especially when updates to everything else are much more frequent.
I also work as a sysadmin maintaining all these devices, and every time I move files between the laptops running Mint I'm confronted with Xfce's old file transfer dialog. You're gonna love the improvements 4.20 made when it finally hits the repos.
I think I just reached the point where my NixOS is configured exactly as I want, so now the system just works and works without me changing anything. 😭 I’m gonna have to start having sex since I can no longer justify it on the lack of time.
Don't show this image to my girlfriend
Literally me.
Which one?
Both
Is it sad that I knew at a glance what that code is doing?
Oh please. Be real. Are you sure there's nothing in your flake to refactor or modularize? :)
Sure is, but do I wanna do it? 🤓
You mean, spend 4-6 days tearing your hair out, before landing on a solution which evaluates to literally the same output as your current version, but is 10% cleaner and more elegant?
Of course you do, after all, that satisfies that itch. Well. For a while, anyways...
Sigh… if you put it that way, I can probably take another glance through my config for that one line I can trim down.
He can upgrade from
22.05to25.11, I guess?I hit that point, needed to add a few things and changed settings around, and everything broke. I tinker with little things way too much to use Nix.
I‘m sure there’s a window manager you haven’t explored yet.
For sure, the thing is I’m satisfied. Like I actually am, I have the system I want, there is nothing else I’m curious to try. 😭
Congratulations. You can do actual work now.
I feared this day would come.
Time to "accidentally" break something
Nix fixes that.
A boring OS is a healthy OS.
I was about to say! Who the hell thinks their computer being reliable is boring!?
People who like fixing things.
Yeah but I like to tinker when I chose to tinker. Not randomly when I'm trying to get work done
I am one of those people, but I'm still annoyed when my tools don't work right. I hate having to fix something, only to find out that my tool I need for that also needs repairs. I use my computer's primarily as tools, so I almost always am at least a little annoyed when my computer demands attention all of a sudden.
Maybe there are others that are hobbyists. I guess if you're a computer tinkerer primarily, troubleshooting that crap can be like cultivating a zen garden, but it is the opposite for me.
I totally understand. That’s why I have a working Mac and a sometimes working Linux machine.
back when i used to get burgled regularly, it was great. forced us out of the flat for a while before the insurance came in, far better than wasting time on pointless computance.
Yeah, that's me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I've only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it's nice.
Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.
Ah, thankfully I didn't run into that one. I have a goxlr and they broke it for 2 weeks so I did a manual rollback until it was fixed, because having audio is kinda nice.
Based on my years of community experience, whichever you pick is wrong and you're a bad person for thinking that it was the right choice.
Fuck you for having that opinion!
::: spoiler spoiler If you put a ! before the link it'll embed the image (you may need to leave the [] blank, I'm not sure) :::
I know. I specifically chose not to.
e: lol don't downvote them! People come to the meme community with no sense of humor, smhing my head.
I appreciate you!
That reminds me, anyone know if I can have the images/gifs in comments be collapsed as default?
The default web interface doesn't do it and the images are not tagged in a way that you could easily fix it with CSS. You could possibly do it with a greasemonkey script (see your local LLM).
Haha, you overestimate me, I'm struggling with trying to change the colors in CSS, trying to hide images or whatnot would be like asking a monkey to change the timing belt of a car engine.
The old.lemmy.world frontend has the option to "collapse inline media" in the settings, but it isn't available on the default one.
I figured out the "collapse inline media" thing about 2 months ago... after almost 2 decades of reddit use... about 3 weeks before I deleted my account...
Oh well, at least I got to enjoy it for a wee bit there
I just picked omarchy for my first time using linux as my primary os
How do you like it?
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
To invert an argument, prefix it with
no-or capitalize the short form, for example to turn off--sarcastic(or-s), use--no-sarcasticor-S.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.
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.
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!
Tune Arch ONCE. Sets you for life
and also back up in case a borked package(s) appears in an update
In this economy? Really, GreenBeanMachine?
NixOS -- now I've finally found the endgame distro!
several days later CachyOS is actually much simpler.
NixOS' learning curve is brutal.
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).
What's the one on the left?
Either way, boring is good.
Bazzite iirc
Boring is good indeed. I'm running Bazzite on both my gaming desktop as well as my work laptop (webdev). The only reason I think about Bazzite at all is because I see it mentioned everywhere and feel the need to share my experience. Otherwise, it really is out of sight, out of mind.
Yup. I agree. Immutable distros save me from myself and endless tweaking. I have it on my gaming laptop and my gaming desktop. I'll be throwing it on my wife's gaming desktop soon enough.
I don't have any experience with immutable distros, are they harder/impossible to tweak, or just easier?
The core files are read-only. You can layer new system applications, but it's not as easy as just installing a package. Most things are handled via Flatpaks. So the base is solid and you can't do much to really ruin the stability.
There is a learning curve, as it's different than normal distros.
Here is a decent read up on it: https://www.linuxnest.com/what-is-an-immutable-distro
Bazzite. An immutable^[1]^ distro pre-configured for gaming.
::: spoiler [1]
The root system is one image and can't be altered.
Software is installed from a GUI software center via flatpak.
A bit like Android.
:::
Just stay on Debian and be patient for the new Plasma version. Problem solved.
But GIMP just fixed the issues I was having with it, too!
Can you cherry pick the patch?
Best I can do is pepper brush it.
Sid for life!
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
That can be done in regular distros with Ansible.
And in the center of the graph you can find Fedora.
Far from perfect but the exact middle ground
https://gentoo.org/
Installed gentoo on my desktop, never looked back
And once you do this there's distcc for the laptops
This is so true, and why I choose OpenSUSE
Highly underrated distro!
Tried that, but my autism didn't like it.
The fact that YaST and the KDE settings had overlapping functionality, a GUI package manager frontend that shows you options you aren't supposed to use in Tumbleweed, and it being the only modern distro that couldn't install my printer-scanner-combo automatically drove me off.
YaST is dead and kde settings overlapping? Wut?
YaST is dead?
OK it's been a few years since I last tried OpenSUSE.
Ye, its another "software-center" now called myrlyn. I still use sudo zypper for everything and I like the sudo zypper dup for updating your machine and make sure everything on both drivers and software related is updated by the distro it self, so you don't end up with mitchmatches here and there. Also the snap funktion for rollback by default is epic.
For me, I didn't like patterns (or the work-arounds). A shame because it (or now, maybe slowroll) might be closer to what I'm looking for, especially if the talk of smoke-testing is true. (though I've also seen someone say that Zypper is slow)
I like some of what I've seen with NixOS, though I see quite a few things that make it seem like not the answer either. And some of the things (like distrobox) seem like they probably add weight to updating as well (and/or clunkiness, if I have to manually do it).
Also some of my issue is I'm still running a 1050Ti (and Arch putting the legacy drivers on the AUR, a bit of a pain for me... not sure if that has changed though), I know that'd likely be even worse on Nix as well.
EDIT: I've tried Flatpak for user apps as well, and needing to download graphics drivers again really defeats the purpose.
Ideally I'd like something that has an update system intended for slower internet. Something that can pull (/keep) slightly older dependencies when user-land stuff is a bit slow, or outright delay/reschedule possibly-broken (for any number of reasons) updates rather than wasting a user's time and bandwidth. Guessing it doesn't exist, though (or if it does, it has some other huge workflow flaw).
Mentioning @[email protected] because they've talked about Tumbleweed and Nix.
I remember reading that you couldn't turn it off unless you outright disabled recommended packages. Reading again, I see conflicting statements and it seems like a common thing people take issue with. Though even locking seems to me like it should just be something that happens during explicit removal, if that is a fix.
So I still kind of hate stuff like that.
My system is currently outdated and mostly usable, but has 4 different application issues (1 crash, 1 flicker, 1 compiling/library error, 1 feature error)... before I stopped updating, rolling updates gave me a few bad rolls that did not fix some of these issues (and if I'd have rolled not even week later w/o reading the news, I would've been toasted into terminal-fix-it-now-land).
So I'd say there's a lot of room for improvement here. I dream of something that works like this:
Non-critical applications may be updated less. Security updates or marked-as-needed-fix more. Alternatively, supporting explicit branches (like Godot's 3.X and 4.X) in official repos helps. Maintenance updates (nothing known broken) may be delayed if something seems/is-known wrong (build-bots, user reports or comments, upstream fix needed or dependency too new, admin/maintainer intervention etc)
Ultimately, this could mean an update about every week or slower than once a month depending on packages and if the user encounters issues or not. And I'm sure this may be possible with some package system, but again not something default (and less effective if a package system doesn't provide the needed structure/information).
Hardware wise, yeah I'm otherwise still pretty happy with the performance level I have (and it's a fine target for my own stylized projects, still working on that). A smaller(+more efficient) system would be nice, but GPUs seem to still be behind/lower-value than CPUs though. Polaris would be fine just to make things easier though, not that I want to buy a sidestep especially when the market is so stagnant. Same thing with workarounds that won't be really cheaper either (esp, w/RAM etc pricing).
What I'm talking about was an issue with 1 package due to sandboxing, and it was Krita IIRC (something I don't care about sandboxing on). I think KDE stuff was being pulled in too (I don't use it, but I do use Kate and few other things that use Qt).
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.
Fedora is just a straight line, as I've found.
Tumbleweed somehow gives me the newest Plasma with neither configuration nor manual dependency resolution exhaustion. It is not perfect either but it squares the circle of a stable rolling release distro surprisingly well.
Slackware in 2026? Didn't know it was still around
Yeah, but in my experience it isn't great. Salix is a lot nicer.
Of course, your mileage may vary. There are definitely still a lot of true slackers out there!
Install a random distro once a week for the next 6 months.
The answer: Fedora
You're welcome.
But I don’t want to use American software 🤷
Opensuse is also great: Like Fedora its rpm-based and backed by a corpo and with Tumbleweed you'll get a nice rolling release experience without worries that it's gonna bork itself
Isnt leap the stable release?
Yes, Leap is the regular-release version of openSUSE
But the lizard looks so unserious, my family thinks it’s untrustworthy 🤷
(I went with Debian in the end and we love it)
Fedora is the best. My friend who recently started using Linux persuades me to install NixOS (which I've already tried 2 years ago), but I really can't leave Fedora. Everything just works and are up to date.
Bazzite is already pictured, and OP already complains that it's too boring!
"Step-Operating-System what are you doing!?"
"Manual configuration is exhausting" my brother in christ that's the whole fun of having a fucking computer
GUIX GUIX GUIX
My Arch install has had no issues upgrading for years, even with the big KDE updates
Time to learn kernel maintenance
For my bare metal personal systems, I just use Debian stable with backports. When that does not suffice, I manually build and install things from source.
@mech I use Void Linux on my old laptop from 2007 and it's fine enough for me. If I'll change Windows to Linux on my main PC though, I'll pick something Debian-based (but not Ubuntu-based), because I need something balanced and with lots of software available to download.
CachyOS
You can keep your Plasma release, I'm happy to wait.
Roll with Debian Testing? Or even SID?
Debian Testing kinda sucks, it's like the worst of both worlds of Debian and Arch; updates for some packages can be held back for months because of some blocker, while stable at least gets fastracked to important fixes for security or system stability, and Sid just naturally gets them faster because it's more up to date. Sid is probably better overall, but why use an unstable rolling release without all the convenience that Arch's tools offer? AFAIK pacman is really nice for stuff like making your own packages. Plus it has a much larger user base than Debian Sid, which helps when you're looking for a fix for recent issues.
I've found Testing works rather well as a compromise. It's actually very stable, while most of the time, constantly updating. It's only during freeze time it stops noticeably changing. At unfreeze, there is a load at once, but it's yet to be a real problem for me in like 15y. SID is a bit too bleeding edge for my liking. The Arch and SID guys can be on the front line, that's fine. I thank them for their service, but I don't want it quite as interesting as that.
Well, you do you. My Debian Testing install was my only bare metal install that ever broke because of an update (not to say that Arch etc. would have been any better, I just haven't been using rolling release distros since then).
Well that is always the risk from moving from stable anything. It is called Testing after all, and I have found and reported things a few times. I just had nothing I couldn't fix and wasn't fixed later. As I said, it's about right for me. I put most people, and any servers, only on Stable.
Come to Mint. We're standing by X11, and Cinnamon looks better than Plasma.
You aren't standing by X11, Wayland support just isn't finished yet.
I think Cinnamon might even be one of the first desktops other than the big two that is going to be finished (more or less) with Wayland support.
Personally, I have been using window managers for years. You'd think that would make the transition easier (sway is even explicitly designed as a drop-in replaced for i3wm), but you need to configure so many of the tools around it (task/statusbar, screensaver/lockscreen, clipboard manager ...) and I just couldn't be bothered. I'm definitely past that "tinker with all the things"-stage of being a Linux user ...
🤷
Well, I guess I'm not responsible for the mistakes of the devs.
And an older version of Xfce than Debian
Why
Because it just works. Which is what an OS and DE need to do first and foremost.
Agreed. I use Arch, Debian, and Mint with Xfce on all of them. It's stable as a rock in every iteration.
That being said, Debian's the distro famous for out of date packages, so its a little silly that Mint has it beat in this regard, especially when updates to everything else are much more frequent.
I also work as a sysadmin maintaining all these devices, and every time I move files between the laptops running Mint I'm confronted with Xfce's old file transfer dialog. You're gonna love the improvements 4.20 made when it finally hits the repos.
based.
I use CachyOS with Cinnamon, so...why not both?
Cinnamon can be installed on most mainstream distros, actually. I definitely agree that it looks better than Plasma.
Pick a side bruh
No. Is there an Italian distro?
ArcheOS
So.Di.Linux
BOINC.Italy Linux Distro (BILD)
DEFT Linux
Sabayon Linux
openmamba
maybe gentoo?
Update: I have made one full revolution since I posted this.
debian unstable