I have no experience for this matter, nor a lot of Linux either, but there seem to be some interesting choices here (there isn’t best and worst, it’s just a list, and the most adapted to what you need).
One distro that I’ve recently found runs pretty well on older/slower systems like this is wattOS. It’s a distro focused on power efficiency, but because of that it does well on underpowered systems.
Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.
How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.
It’s an Ubuntu-derivative using Gnome, but with a large number of tweaks to make it very user friendly out of the box. They have a variety of pre-made layouts in a beautiful theme that can pretty well replicate Windows 7, 10, 11 and Mac layouts among others, as well as a clear option to include Nvidia drivers OOTB in install media, and a better WINE experience for example.
It supports wayland just fine.
In my view it has all the benefits of Mint without many of the drawbacks stemming from its custom DE.
I personally don’t use it, preferring Gentoo or Fedora, but I think it is a very good choice for beginners or those people who only use a computer for web browsing and home office use.
I would definitely recommend installing it in a VM or liveUSB and trying it out. It won me over, when I thought it would just be another themed distro.
I encountered limitations on NixOS, as instance Ly display manager, or using an app compiled by myself. Maybe there are solution but it is not always simple. Archlinux is way more flexible. Updates can theorically breaks the system , but since one year I never broke Arch despite updates on 200+ packages.
Notice I favors minimalist graphic environments (WM that don’t need updates ) and minimalists apps as much as possible, such as MPV and nsxiv. I don’t fear of some keyboard shortcuts. This philosophy probably helps Arch updates. Sometimes I had problem on apps (Inkscape and Dolphin-emu), I use appimages for them. Nothing is perfect, but Arch put lighter roadblocks than NixOS.
I already installed 6 (the Tree) on my… Gnome laptop. As opposite to one of the feedbacks on the competition page said about the Night version, I don’t care about legibility of my desktop items huhuhu.
I don’t use those two flags, but have several pis running docker with no issues. They’ve been running (almost) 24/7/365 going on maybe 2 years now with the same sd cards.
In my experience, you still have your same path to your nix installed binaries in the distribox container, so you shouldnt even have to duplicate your configuration. I also dont suspect python dev to be that bad so long as you use venv or conda.
Use Nix expressions or flakes for that - just copy a simple example of default.nix or shell.nix from a git host and tweak it to your liking. Personally, I am not a fan of how Nix handles Python, and still can’t get used to how Python packages have to be included in expressions, so I create a temporary virtual environment for the time-being.
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
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