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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
But have you tried Gentoo?
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.