I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.
Keep in mind, I started using Linux this summer and in a few years I’ll probably look back at this wondering why I was such an idiot, but I gotta fall and get a bloody nose first to notice ;3
I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.
I was on the same boat as you are, flatpak essentially made it all perfect.
For me, the issue with Debian stable currently isn’t the applications, but the DE. Wayland support and UX gets better with every update of Gnome/KDE, and that isn’t something you can install via flatpak.
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.
My honest opinion? Neither. Just go with something that works out of the box like Linux mint until you’re done with school then you’ll have time to mess with your system. That’s what I did for a friend of mine when he went to college. Gave him a laptop with mint on it and never heard a single complaint from him. It has everything he needs. Focus on school now and worry about distros later.
While true, but they also need a system that they don’t need to mess with so they can focus on their school. Unless they’re going into w degree that utilizes Linux then I guess it makes more sense.
I have to agree, if you’re late or have assignments that don’t work correctly because of your special Arch/Nix install, you’re going to be in for a very rough time. College is when you need to focus on learning exactly what is prescribed by the professors and instructors. Anything else you learn is secondary, and your free time is best spent on extracurriculars and trying to make friends because thats the stuff that’s really hard to do after college. Y’know what’s not hard to do after college? Scavenge a junk computer for next to nothing and install NixOS and Arch on it
I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a lot more spare time to tinker with linux when I was a student than after, having a full time job. But I guess if you only have the one computer and need it to work, then tinker in a VM or something. Don’t wait with tinkering and learning about linux if it is interresting to you and something you want to spend time on. You might not have the time for it in a few years.
Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.
For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.
What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.
Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don’t have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.
What I didn’t like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn’t find easily.
like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I’ll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox
Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it’s not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.
Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn’t added through the config file so there’s no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.
Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it’s an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it’s supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.
Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn’t have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn’t even be doing.
Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I’ve been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.
At least I’m pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.
So since you’ve already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.
I want to make a small correction - this is not true:
iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.
nixos-rebuild behaves like most package managers: it makes new packages available immediately, and restarts relevant systemd services. Like other distros you have to reboot to run a new kernel.
And cleaning up Steam games is as issue with most distros too. But I kinda see your point.
Btw Nix (both NixOS and the Nix package manager running in other distros) has this feature where you can run packages without “installing” them if you just want to run them once:
That puts you in a shell with one or more packages temporarily installed. The packages are downloaded to /nix/store/ as usual, but will get garbage-collected sometime after you close the shell.
Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly
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.
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.
I’ve been using Arch for almost 8 years, and I enjoy basically everything about it. Since Nix has been so popular lately, I thought I’d take a look at it too. I like what it does, but the documentation is really poor, and the learning curve is insanely steep. When flakes and nix-command become stable, I’ll be giving it another shot
It’s yay, which took up ~160 GiB. It was storing previous versions of AUR binaries which I guess added up over time. I posted a screenshot of ncdu outputs for a more detailed breakdown in one of the other reply threads
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
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