I don’t understand why so many people are comfortable using the Office Job OS when they could be using something that suits them.
It comes preinstalled on most computers people buy. Tbh that is mostly the reason.
It’s like if you bought a house and it came with a full closet of “good enough for you” suits and instead of going out and buying comfy clothes you just use the suits provided, especially because you know how to wear suits and haven’t yet figured out how to wear hoodies which look “harder” (ok the analogy is falling apart but ykwim).
Every website knows what browser you’re using unless you change your user agent to pretend to be a different one (although even that won’t always work). The banner is a little weird, but it really is good advice, chromium based browsers are a huge danger to the open web
I recommend first trying the Nix package manager on Arch to see how you like it. You can use it to install some things in your home directory without interfering with the Arch package manager.
My go-to is an arch container just because I like to have rolling releases, access to AUR, and I like pacman. I wouldn’t overthink it though. If the fedora container works for you, then it’s fine.
Once I found out about Paru, I decided I would no longer need another OS outside of everything Arch provides. Also, Valve decided to switch SteamOS to Arch, so I'm sticking with it once they release it.
As a recent NixOS convert coming from Bazzite (Kinoite/Silverblue with user friendly daily driver and gaming tweaks), and before that mostly Arch-based distros, I’d say it boils down to the tradeoff between having way more control over reproducibility and having to deep dive into the often poorly documented domain specific rabbit hole that is Nix. If you’re comfortable with going out of your way to learn, looking for examples, reading source code to find out what options you can use or how stuff works, it can absolutely be worth it but it’s a steep price to pay for sure.
I personally adore what Nix sets out to solve and find it extremely rewarding to learn. Plus, as a developer, I enjoy puzzling out how to get stuff done and don’t mind diving into the source if I need to, so it works for me. I’d absolutely prefer solid documentation, of course, but it’s not a deal breaker.
When it comes to software, the Nix repo has a staggering amount of prebuilt binaries ready to download (which you can search here) and it’s often not too hard to hack together your own reproducible package if you want after you get comfortable enough with it. At least for my use cases, I haven’t really missed much from my days using Arch and the AUR. If anything, I appreciate how much more consistent it tends to be in comparison.
If you, like myself, go for a flake (yet another rabbit hole within a rabbit hole) based setup and point to the unstable repo, you basically get a fully reproducible, easy to update and rollback rolling release not too dissimilar to using Arch with auto btrfs snapshots enabled. That’s how I used to do Arch and it feels pretty familiar.
Anyway, that’s what I got. If you have any more specific concerns or questions I’d be happy to elaborate!
Edit: I forgot to add but I find a nice way to get comfortable without fully commiting is using Nix as a package manager on any old distro. You could install it on Endeavour (I recommend this method) and play around with Home Manager, use it as a dotfiles manager on steroids, have it declaratively install and manage the CLI apps you can’t live without and whatnot, see how you like it. That’s how I started, I have a common HM config I’ve so far used with Debian at work, Ubuntu running under WSL when I’m on Windows and now NixOS itself.
init system, without which you’d be left with only one program running at a time
some programs are written in interpreted language (e.g python, shell, perl), so the interpreter would also be required
C library, without which none of the above would function (yes, even if all the programs are statically compiled, it still has that library included with each executable)
this one is not necessary for the runtime, but is needed for creating a working system: toolchain – preprocessor, compiler, linker, assembler – all the stuff for transforming the source code into executables
Another comment mentioned Linux From Scratch, I’d totally recommend that, but it would take so much of your time manually building stuff (which is why it is so educational). If you don’t have the time, you may want to opt with Gentoo instead.
The multi-user system, which is a bunch of config files, libraries, utils and UIs, that deal with logging in or doing stuff as a specific user.
The logging system. Individual applications can simply log to a different file each but for system services the logging is usually centralized and offers additional features (like logging remotely etc.)
Setting up networking is pretty much mandatory these days.
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