Absolutely +1 for flakes. It’s got some annoying UX sometimes (make sure you git add any new files before building!) but absolutely makes up for it by its features.

NixOS is indeed probably the safest way to run an “unstable” distro. No matter what you do or mess up you can always reboot back.

I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can’t recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it’s a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction… I’ve only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it (“infect”) to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects… if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it’ll work forever and anywhere.

Ah I see, haven’t been on “stable” distros for a long time so I wasn’t affected. I’ve enjoyed the good support and the video stuff is definitely nice. On the AMD side, still no idea how to encode or decode anything on my Framework 16, meanwhile Intel is acing it.

Hmm, I run an Arc GPU at work without any issues. Just using plain mesa on NixOS. The Intel devs were quite responsive when we ran into issues as well.

Awesome! Maybe I can finally switch to using it, though OBS settings are quite confusing.

omg I totally accidentally enabled this

I’d bother removing it but it’s kinda funny to get an email reprimanding me when I ctrl+c out of a sudo command I mistyped, and maybe it will serve as a warning if it gets compromised :p

Very cool! Added the RSS.

Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!

I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx

I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!

Hope some of this is helpful!

This is very cool! I’ll definitely use it if it gets a Nix package.

Found out just now he made a video about it and explained his actual experience using it, it’s really cool! Glad to see more folks sharing this stuff.

Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)

I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)

Never heard of FuriLabs, looks really cool. How open is the OS/hardware? Could be my next phone… though I’d love to see an immutable approach so I can’t be left with a broken system after an update.

The article is good, however I’d really appreciate having fedi-style content warnings on AI-generated images. I don’t interact with mainstream social mediums so I generally do not see it, however in the thumbnail and contents of the article there are some quite disturbing images and videos that I’d have chosen not to see (description is enough) given the choice…

Good news!

Good point… I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install…

Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.

Have you asked whether they’d be okay with a dual-boot? I recently started work as well (gamedev) and while most of the studio is on Windows I was able to set up a NixOS install for productivity (and to test the game on more configs).